The Reluctant Berserker (26 page)

What had changed since then to turn Wulfstan to stone? Leofgar reviewed his words, and weariness entangled him. Oh. He had boasted that he was no boy. So Wulfstan would now be looking back on that moment and thinking it a lie. He would be wondering what profit there was in keeping Leofgar company, if all he got out of it was combative kisses and perhaps a hand no more talented or obliging than his own.

Wulfstan had discharged any debt incurred when Leofgar saved his life. Leofgar had told him outright he had no chance of gaining him for a ganymede. When he was not lost, he would leave, and Leofgar could not, for all his word-skill, think of any reason to offer him to stay.

Chapter Seventeen

Under the rich yellow light of a clean-washed sun, mist lay over water and trees. The reeds swayed and changed colour as the billowing air showed forth a dozen different shades. On either side of the road, small birds peeped in the stalks of purple mallow and the feathery umbels of pignut. The day smelled like mead diluted with ten parts of water—distantly honey-sweet.

Wulfstan tried to be soothed by all of this, but failed. When he forgot them, his eyes would slide back to Leofgar who walked beside him. In this world of beauty, Leofgar was the crown. The dew sparkled on his hair, moisture darkening the gold to the colour of ripe barley. His hands on the reins were long and slender and fine boned. The way they worked fascinated Wulfstan, whose own seemed clumsy to him. So precise, so delicate.

Somewhere in the battle or in the struggle with his lord, Leofgar had lost his round green hat, so he was capped now only with curls. It was easier to see the angelic sternness of his face. Those eyes, grey under starlight, were ice-blue beneath the sun. So often luminous and speaking, they were now cast down in weariness, and his bruised face was still and emotionless, drawn in fine lines, his hard, ungenerous mouth set thin.

He really was a tricksy, elflike creature, Wulfstan thought, ambivalent and hard to understand. Last night, in the battle, they had seemed to be of one mind, easy together as old friends. They had both yearned to be of one body too, reached out for what they needed and found it perfectly supplied in the other, like a key discovering the lock made for it.

Then Leofgar had let slip what he really thought of men of Wulfstan’s kind, and it was no more generous than what Cenred had thought. Wulfstan didn’t know who to hate more for it—Leofgar or himself.

Once they passed the place they had hidden in the marshes, the road began to worsen. Swans came sailing up beside them, as the mound on which the road was supported lowered towards the water. Puddles stretched from one side to the other. Water rippled all around and geese honked overhead.

To the west, an island of wheat fields and gardens upheld a distant village wreathed in smoke. They could see horses and cattle at graze in meadows spangled with flowers, but between the end of the road and the first rise of the island lay at least a league of water which neither they nor Fealo could swim.

“I thought this was too easy.” Leofgar turned to give Wulfstan a cheery smile, as though he knew Wulfstan’s mood was black, but did not know why. As though he hoped to jolly him out of it by his own example. “Didn’t we pass a fisherman’s hut a mile back? Let’s go there and ask him if there is a route across.”

They turned back, and at Leofgar’s expression of false cheer over true confusion, Wulfstan understood that it was he who was the contrary, changeable creature here. He saw that Leofgar had hoped they would end their journey in the same spirit of unity in which they had battled, and did not know what had happened since to make that stop.

“As you like,” he said. Then he felt ungracious and offered, “Perhaps he will offer us hospitality too. My stomach growls for hunger like a wolf.”

So they turned around and picked their way back to the reed-thatched hut that was the last dwelling they had passed. It stood on pilings out in the fen, and two long, flat boats were moored underneath it, clopping gently at the supports as the waters moved them. There was no sign of life outside, but smoke filtered out of the thatch and made the whole hut seem on fire.

Thinking that a scop would be greeted with less fear than a warrior, Wulfstan let Leofgar slosh out to it and swing himself up the netted rope steps that hung from the door. This, he pushed open to let a great billow of smoke and warmth puff out as he clambered within. Wulfstan followed only when a dirty-faced child looked out afterward and beckoned him.

Inside the hut, the marsh dwellers offered Wulfstan a reed mattress on which to sit cross-legged, while the thick smoke of the peat fire made his eyes stream. Mopping them in the crook of his elbow, he accepted a leather cup of small beer. When his eyes had recovered enough to pick out details in the sullen red-lit dim, he watched Leofgar bargain for passage across the water to Ely.

The fenman with whom Leofgar spoke was little more than a youth himself, beardless but tanned like old leather. His wife had a child in the crook of one arm, while with the other she wove withies into swift-built eel traps. In the well of the roof, where the smoke was thickest, bundles of smoked fish hung head down and regarded Wulfstan with brown-tarnished eyes.

When he had drunk the beer, the wife took his cup away and refilled it with hot salty eel stew from the cauldron in the centre of the fire. In silence she passed him this and accompanied it with a hank of horse-bread so roughly milled he could see the hedgerow gleanings embedded in the wheat.

Soaking it in the stew to spare his teeth, he chewed mightily and assessed the place for possible threats.

Leofgar held the husband’s attention with brilliant smiles and wide, friendly gestures, exaggerated rather than false. Still the woman’s attention was rarely off Wulfstan, and the man’s regard returned to him whenever Leofgar faltered. They were afraid of him, of his sword and his silence. After Leofgar’s unknowing contempt, it pleased him to see it.

Perhaps it was the fear, or perhaps it was Leofgar’s offer of one of his many rings that made the man say at last, “Well, lords, if you can keep the horse under control, we’ll try it. Best if we take you across to Welingeham. It’s a little further, but you can get along the causeway at Bealdread’s Hill there, and after that it’s dry land all the way.”

“We are grateful for your wisdom.” Leofgar looked like he meant it. He seemed just as at ease here amid the mean folk as he was at a banquet, as though he made no matter of high degree or low.

But if that was so, why did he make so great a matter of man and boy?

When the fisherman passed Leofgar’s offered ring to his wife, she put her child down in the nest of rushes beside Wulfstan and reached for the single plain chest that sat against the wall. Unlocking it with the key at her girdle, she took out a small leather pouch and worked its stiff mouth open. Wulfstan’s sleepy vigilance moved over the other small items of her treasure with disinterest. Halted, pricked by something sharper. His heart fell and then raced as he looked again.

Yes, he recognised that brooch. An old thing made of polished brass that gleamed like gold in the low light, it had a raised bow to hold the many folds of a cloak, and at the end its foot was shaped like the head of a horse with blank eyes and big nostrils. He’d seen it gleam like a spite stake in firelight before he’d turned and run from Saewyn’s spell.

“A woman came here,” he said, staring intently at it.

The fisher-wife threw the thin band of Leofgar’s ring into the purse, pulled it up tight and thrust it back into the chest as if she expected him to snatch it from her. The husband’s hands stilled on his net.

“Peace,” Wulfstan said. “I do not dispute your right to the trinket. Only tell me about the woman who gave it to you, for I know it. It belongs to the mother of…a friend of mine. We keep missing each other in the wilderness. When did she pass this way?”

The fisherman and his wife exchanged a speaking glance. Wulfstan wondered if Saewyn had known he would come here too. Wondered if she had bribed them to do away with him. She must have a poor grasp on his abilities if she thought either of these wretches could be any threat to him.

Unless of course…he looked down at the empty cup of stew with a new and terrible suspicion. She was a herb-wife, she would know how to poison a man quietly, in a way that didn’t show. There had been so many rumours on her husband’s death. That vile man had died of an ague Saewyn had treated with her drenches and her brewings. Many had muttered that she might have slipped henbane into the mix, though all agreed that if she had, it would only be what he deserved.

“She came yesterday, my lord,” said the fenman, his hands beginning to work again. “I took her as I will take you. She may yet be at the nuns’ guesting house in Alrehethe. If she is not there, you will surely catch up with her at the abbey.”

Wulfstan contemplated the possibility of poison further. Examining his gut revealed no discomfort, and the stew had been ladled out from a pot from which everyone else had also eaten. They did not appear the worse for it either. No, Saewyn had hounded him with magic, surely it was with magic she would continue to work, not knowing that St. Aethelthryth protected him.

The thought actually surprised him. As they edged the nervous horse into the larger of the two flat-bottomed boats, made him lie down and tied him in place, his ears flicking and his nostrils wide at the smell of old fish, Wulfstan was amazed to find that since meeting up with Leofgar again he had forgotten the curse altogether.

With Fealo strapped tight, there was no room in that boat for passengers. It went on ahead of them, while the fishwife, her baby in a wicker basket on her back, motioned them into the other. She took up a long pole and pushed them through the encircling reeds, out into the open water, following her husband with ease.

It was hard to watch mother and child together, the baby’s head lolled in trusting abandon between its mother’s shoulder blades, without new thoughts about Saewyn. Once, Cenred had been that tiny, that helpless, that dependent upon his mother. Once, she had nursed him and taught him and gloried in his small achievements. If he had been cruel, if he had betrayed Wulfstan—or been about to—why should that matter to a mother? She had lost everything, and her pain must be infinitely greater than anything he suffered at her hands.

“You are very solemn today.” Leofgar sat cross-legged on a tangle of moss-green ropes. Not wanting the damn
hearpes
on a different boat from himself, he had taken them off Fealo’s back and had not yet given over cuddling them with a tenderness that made Wulfstan jealous. “Have I done something to insult you, or make you think I did not appreciate everything you have done for me?”

To insult me? Yes, you did that.
Wulfstan’s mind turned from one trouble to another, fortunately unable to battle more than one at a time.

Yet you sit there, looking like…
Oh, Leofgar was lithe and sharp, and his hands were large for all they were fine. Wulfstan was endlessly troubled by the thought of them, imagining the sure, talented fingers in his mouth, in his arse. Though it had ended badly, Cenred’s touch had only confirmed to him what he wanted. He could not look at Leofgar without wanting it again, and more.

But Leofgar’s words had hit him hard, revealing the depths of the harper’s contempt for the “soft little cringing catamites” who desired what Wulfstan desired. Though—it seemed clear enough from what had passed between them so far—he would lie with Wulfstan willingly, give him what he yearned for, and be pleased and proud to be man enough to do it, he would despise Wulfstan after, just as Cenred had.

It was not possible to tell Leofgar why he felt insulted without admitting he was just such a catamite himself—without inviting that contempt.

Wulfstan had rather have Leofgar’s respect than his body. He just wished it were allowed to have both. “Do you remember I told you that the mother of the man I slew had vowed revenge upon me?” he said, hoping to cover the deeper concern with the nearer.

“I do. She put a curse on you, you said, and it has been following you…” Leofgar stopped himself, tilted his head with understanding brightening his eyes. “
She
has been following you? Or should I say, it is she who is now ahead of us?”

“I think so.” Wulfstan looked over his shoulder at the wife slowly but steadily poling the punt past the island garden they had seen from the road. She didn’t look as though she was listening, but he took the chance to lean in closer to Leofgar just in case. “The night you went back to face Tatwine, I came late after you. There was a…” The memory of it was a chill but not the unreasonable panic it had once been. “There was a spite stake. I was drawn to it because it had been set up for me.”

Leofgar’s eyes widened. He closed a hand around Wulfstan’s wrist protectively. His gaze moved fretfully as he thought—always a dozen thoughts before he spoke, so unlike Wulfstan, so clever. The clasp firmed into one of congratulations, and he smiled, bright but sweet. “Yet here you are, alive, with your mind whole, and no longer jumping at shadows. So you have faced the spirits on your own and defeated them? You will not need me any more.”

“Never that.” Wulfstan’s smile came involuntarily. “Or say rather that if I do not need your company, still I want it very much.”

A glad glance as Leofgar looked swiftly into his eyes and away—as though he wanted to see something but scarcely dare look. “That’s…” and he looked out to where a family of reed warblers were cheeping warning at the boat, “…something I want too.”