The Reluctant Berserker (30 page)

“Let him be made spotless so that he can be accepted into the heavenly kingdom, and I will be your…” …
handmaid
, he wanted to say, but couldn’t get it out, “…servant for now and the rest of my days.”

For a long while, he sat with his hand on the casket. Tears dampened the stone around his fingers. At length he received the feeling that he had said all he needed to say. The deed was done and over, the offer heard and granted. Sniffing, he let out a deep heartfelt sigh and rose. He felt lighter rather than heavier, though he bore Cenred’s lifetime of sins as well as his own. Who would have thought they weighed so little?

At the doorway he looked back. Briefly, as the flames of the oil lamps in the corners of the shrine danced at his movement, he thought he saw the solemn face smile. But that was a foolish fancy brought on by hope. He mocked himself for it as he bent to stoop through the shrine’s low door, with his face turned towards the square of dazzling light where the church’s gate now stood open to the day’s warmth.

As he blinked in the glare, he felt something hard and cold steal along the side of his throat. A slight but tall presence, cloaked in a brown so dim he could scarcely see it in the indoor twilight, resolved out of the shadow where the side of the shrine met the wall. Trying to look down brought a thin, sharp pain just above the great vein in his neck, and a warm line tickled down his skin to soak into his collar.

“Would you rob me in the Lord’s house?” he gasped, shocked rigid.

“No,” said a woman’s voice. With her other hand, she put back the hood of her cloak. Shards of green and red light picked out tear tracks on a gaunt and set face. Saewyn. Of course.

“I would not rob you here, murderer. But I would gladly slit your throat.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Saewyn almost slew him out of sheer astonishment at how easy it was. Her hand moved as though controlled by the spirits, and pushed the sharp tip of the knife through skin. She had cut out wens enough before, shaved the skin from either side of a hare lip so it might heal closed, to know the feel of steel through flesh. She knew too that if she drew back now—now that he was alert to her presence and the danger—he would not give her the chance again.

Her son deserved vengeance. She could almost feel Cenred’s spirit in the muscles of her arm, driving them to strike and strike deep. The blood would hit her face like a wave and drench her. It would trickle into the cracks of the coloured floor and steal under the lintel to pool around the saint whose mercy this child-killer had dared to depend on.

Doubtless she would be imprisoned and tried after, but she cared not for that. Cenred’s weregild sat heavy in the bag over her shoulders, pulled down the strap with a weight like a hand. She could scatter it in the flood of gore and show thereby her contempt for Wulfstan’s money and his apologies.

But when she had pictured this, all the rest of the journey after her wiccecraft had failed, she had not expected her prey to have tears drying on his cheeks when she ran him to ground. She had not imagined she would pause in hiding and hear him plead for her son’s soul. She had not thought that while her arm would remain eager, her heart would be sore and tired.

Even before the wiccecraft mysteriously stopped working, her heart had begun to betray her. Her mind filled with the memory of him plucking the fisher-child out of the marsh, laughing off its mother’s gratitude. Old memories of him smiling at Cenred, encouraging him when others held back, play fighting with him by snow and sunshine, worked a shape-shift in her head.

“You…loved my son,” she said. The knife wanted blood, wanted to strike deep. It nosed forwards almost against her will, but she restrained it.

“Yes.” Wulfstan didn’t move to defend himself, his hands knotted in his tunic skirts, his back still bent. Though he could have saved himself simply by straightening up, something in him, perhaps, called to the blade, accepted the justice of it.

“You are the only one, except for me, who has ever wept for him.” Saewyn could barely breathe—her chest was full of black emptiness. She held a cold winter sky inside her skin.

If she let the grief out, it would come as screaming. She would hurl blasphemies at the High One for His inexplicable goodness that felt so much like pain—His kindness that had left her to choke on her tears every night for the greater part of her life. Still, though she would swear and spit at God, it seemed she would not go so far as to kill in His holy place.

Yet I could have done.
She drew the knife back.
I held him helpless in my hands. If he now receives his life back, it is as a gift from me.

That felt right. She was after all pledged to preserve life, not to destroy it. This decision was truer to her own spirit, even if a part of her screamed to strike and strike again. Besides, if she cut him down now, before he had a chance to atone for Cenred’s sins, it would not only be Wulfstan she consigned to perdition. If she was to slay him, it should be after confession, absolution, not before.

Released from her blade, Wulfstan moved into the shadows beside her to allow the first of a new trickle of pilgrims to make his way into the shrine. He wrapped the cuff of his undertunic around his hand and pressed two fingers to the small wound in his throat to stop it bleeding. “Cenred was my friend. I did not mean—I wish you would believe this—I did not mean to kill him. I would not have harmed him for my life.”

He looked as breakable as Saewyn felt, in this place where the invisible pressure of angels and archangels, thrones and dominions, filled all the shadowy silences with echoes of immortal song. There was nothing very warriorlike about the pleading in his eyes. If anything it reminded her of the potter’s daughter, when Cenred had taunted and exposed her. Had she not warned her son not to meddle in the judgements of God?

“But he was cruel.” Her voice came out small, like the squeak of a mouse. “My son was cruel. And one day he baited the bear in its den and reaped the inevitable reward.”

She would not weep. Not in front of this her son’s killer. Not though he himself was wiping his nose on his knuckles, with his face scrunched together like a winter-stored apple and tears squeezing from the corners of his eyes. “Cenred couldn’t help that,” he said.

Laughter moved through her like a storm wind, and she sheathed the knife and seized hold of Wulfstan’s arm. It trembled as her own did. He looked down at her with a sharp surprise that could not have been more intense than her own.

“Perhaps a clean death, a fighting death, was a mercy after all.” She felt something fall from her—a dark creature with long talon-tipped arms. Having its weight removed was like learning to stand all over again. “What would have become of my son in a household from which he had removed his only friend? Ecgbert always loved you. His wrath would have been on Cenred from the moment you were destroyed. He would not have rested until my son was made as worthless as he had made you.”

There had been little fondness in the faces around Cenred’s grave, she remembered, but there had been respect. He died as a warrior, not as a coward. He died with honour, unlike his father, and she thought perhaps that would have been all her son had ever hoped for.

Wulfstan pulled away from her and in the process moved out into the light. A tall man topped with fire, who had long been doing a good job of looking invincible but now seemed to have stopped trying. “You know…”

Do I know that you are soft?
She had to laugh again, this time a little less bitter. “My son was no liar. He would not have said you yielded to men if he had not had it proved.”

There was another sad thought—to what a depth this man must have trusted her son. To what a depth had Cenred proved himself unworthy of trust.
How did I fail you so much, my son? How did I teach you so little?

“And you do not condemn me for that alone?”

To her they all looked like boys these days, but this look would have seemed childish on a man as ancient as she. Hopeful, baffled, yearning.

“I have been wondering how you destroyed my spell.” She grieved quietly for all the misfits in the world. “It should not have surprised me. In the old days a man with an inclination like yours would have been welcome to learn runecraft and wiccecraft. He would have been something in-between man and woman. Taunted, yes, but feared too.”

She wasn’t sure how the saint or her Lord would take such talk inside their house, so she led the way out. Wulfstan fell into step beside her, like a son with his mother, and that was so wrong and right together there was no word to describe it.

“Not everyone hears the saints,” she went on, despite or because of it. “Not everyone hears the spirit of God or the other spirits. You have a talent I might have trained if I had seen it earlier.

“I was so sure Cenred had it. Yet because it is often a sign of…” How to put this gently?
Unmanliness
would not do. “It is often a sign of strengths other than those praised by men of weapons. Because of this, my son wanted nothing to do with it.”

They came out of the church into the bustle of the courtyard, sat down together on the wall that ringed the well, where dozens of folk were pushing past, drawing up water to wash and drink either at the ending or the beginnings of their journey.

A monk went past at the head of a duckling-like parade of noble children. Each clutched a wax tablet in their hand, and so Saewyn supposed they were being led to the scriptorium to learn their letters. How many of them would die before their parents? Most, perhaps, for children were frail and Heaven a better fate for them than suffering long on this middle earth.

Wulfstan sat quietly beside her, with an air of apology as though aware that his body took up too much space and that folk who did not know him feared him on sight. By God’s strange sense of humour, he was everything she had hoped for and been denied in her son. “Do you mean…” he asked, cautiously. “Do you mean my…shame…is something shared by others? A sign of some merit within?”

Warriors,
she thought, and corrected herself, for she too had been blind.
People. So foolish. So slow to think good of themselves or each other. As full of poison as an adder’s fang.
“I mean that your trait is often a sign of power. Those who fit in the world’s way see only things visible. Those who do not fit see the unseen. You could not have sent my curse back on itself without that power. You have no shame. True, you are not a man as others measure manliness. That is nothing to be ashamed of.”

He made a strange choking noise and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, his fingertips clutching at his hair. “Do you comfort me?
You?
When I have done you more injury than any man on this earth? Why?”

A just question, as painful as a hot poultice on an infected wound. “I lost my son a long time ago,” she said, and knew the truth of it as she said it. “In the end is not death the fate that awaits all of us, whether it comes soon or late? And you are the one who wept for him. You carry his sins. In a way, you are all that is left of him in this life.”

Tears trickled down his wrists as he lowered his head further. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

Unnatural mother as she was, she felt suddenly a great pity for him. She was a healer after all and did not like to see a wound left untended. “I forgive you.”

Hard words, but they shed the rest of the burden from her back, made him take his hands away from his eyes and look up, watery and amazed. “You do?”

“I do. You came here seeking forgiveness. I give it to you. Now what?” He looked so broken there, without the ever-present simmer of his anger, no longer pretending to be what he was not. “Will you come home? I would teach you, if you did. I would also tell Ecgbert that my son was no liar. Cenred is owed that. If you returned, it would be to a home that knew what you were.”

As he soaked the last tears away on his sleeve, his face hardened and cleared, as though he could deal with threats far more easily than with mercy. “If I do not return?”

“Then your father and brothers, your mother and your lord will know that you ran away. But I will keep silent and let them remember you as best pleases them, for they will also have lost a son, and I am not cruel.”

His look of bewilderment prompted her to lean forward and place a hand on his forearm, so bulky, so strong and so helpless as it lay on his knees, open palms upwards like those of a beggar. “It is not punishment I desire for you but honesty. You have spoken to me freely here. If you would not feel able to speak as freely in your own lord’s hall, your lord’s hall is a prison to you.”

“I understand.” He frowned and studied those empty hands. “I have already told St. Aethelthryth I would serve her for Cenred’s sake and my own. Yet my lord must not be left without a geneat because of my vow. Would you…” He peered into the darkness of the men’s buildings, as if trying to see the copyists at their work inside.

“Weregild is too poor a thing to repay a man’s life. Yet when my father dies, I will come into lands. If I were to make them over to you, would you take them and rule them, provide my lord an armoured geneat from the wealth of them, and be the man I could not be for Ecgbert? There should be money enough in the land to hire a knight and keep you in your old age, as a son should.”

Sometimes, she thought, though it was an idea life and fate had tried to beat out of her over the years, one gave and was given back in equal amounts. It had been so long since it had happened to her, she had given up hoping for it. So it came as a lightning strike out of a clear sky.