The Reluctant Berserker (31 page)

Perhaps she should have expected it from a man who—untrained, instinctive—caught the deadliest working she had ever made and flung it straight back. But to receive good for good, mercy for mercy…so long. So long since that had happened before. The shock, the joy and the anguish of it were at last far too much to bear.

This time it was she who pulled out the pins from the front of her wimple, drew it down to cover her face and, in the white shelter, wept and wept for unexpected endings and irony and the kindness she had almost forgotten the race of mankind was capable of. Such a gift, such a burden, such a terrible thing to have to repay.

Chapter Twenty-Two

The monk, Gewis, had greeted Leofgar like a long-lost son, throwing arms around him for Anna’s sake, no matter the many long years it had been since he and Leofgar’s master had parted.

“This is sad, but not unexpected news,” he said—once Leofgar had told his tale—and lowered himself to kneel on the packed dirt floor, next to the stack of pipes where Leofgar’s guide had found him. “For Anna was an old man, and the winter was harsh. I feared for him, out in it. I am glad to hear he had shelter at the last and an easy passing.”

Like Anna, Gewis retained the hardened, wrinkled skin of a man once much outdoors. Even in the shapeless garments of the Benedictine order, he managed to give off a faint impression of fussiness, his tonsure very neatly shaved, his belt and sandals waxed to a shine, and the fall of his cloth smoothed as if with a hot stone.

“We were young men together when we learned our trade,” he said now, reaching out and laying a hand on one of the red-painted pipes. Hollowed from what looked like a single tree, the two halves held together by shrunk leather bands, the pipe had a fipple hole at one end, as though it were God’s whistle. There were a dozen of them, of various sizes, and an apparatus of bellows, pedals and ropes that, even amidst Leofgar’s sad duty, fascinated his eyes. He had heard an organ once, in the church at Cantwarebyrig, but he had never seen one thus undone, with all its inward parts exposed.

“And we agreed to stand as godfather, should either of us have sons.” Gewis snorted, his melancholy lifting. With some bitterness, Leofgar supposed that Gewis’s sorrow was a shallow thing. To him, no doubt it was all the same whether Anna was in Lundenwic or the Lord’s country, Haedenham or Heaven. They wished each other well, but they were used to being apart.

“We told ourselves we would each take a different circuit,” Gewis said, smiling. “If he had a son, I would foster and teach him. If I, he would. But swiftly the road grew too hard for me. I wanted more than to shuffle around the same small tread wheel, singing the same songs for the same people, keeping my head down lest the youths should take a fancy to hurting me, though I lived to praise them. My voice grew tired of telling tales of feuds and war and killing, and I wanted to find a music that told of other things.”

He looked at Leofgar and seemed to read his astonishment in the fall of his chin, because he smiled. “Ah. You have felt that too? Well, here I have five score voices of men and women to use as my instrument. And when it is fully made, I will have this noble organ with which to thunder my song into the world. I will have better things to praise too.”

Old love came up from the depths of Leofgar’s soul, gleaming like new. At the last, when Tatwine was most demanding, when the terror and the anger lay hardest on him, he had thought Anna grown selfish in his old age. He had thought his master blind or uncaring of his needs. Yet here, after his death, Anna proved that he understood Leofgar’s heart enough to send him to someone who could soothe it.

The knowledge choked his words, left him watching Gewis with wide eyes, his hands twisting together in his lap.

Gewis smiled at him a second time, more gently. “For Anna’s sake I regard you as my godson and my responsibility. Tell me what I can do for you and, if it is within my power, it will be done.”

Parts of the organ lay on tables around the small room in which they sat. Sawdust had drifted into the corners of the floor. From the low ceiling, all around the edges of the room, hung carpenter’s tools, and planks cut into shapes for the abbey’s use. An old rood screen which had dried and cracked, but still bore paint and gilding, leaned against the side of the door, which opened onto a small garden and beyond that a slope down, leading back into the marsh.

Peace came through the door, bringing a faint watery scent with it. The burden Leofgar had been carrying since he pledged fealty to Tatwine slid off his shoulders. He put it down like a sack in the corner and hoped to sneak out after and leave it there until it rotted away entirely.

“What I want?” he said, speaking as much to himself as to Gewis. He had spent so much time running away, fighting, adjusting to Wulfstan’s sudden presence in his life. There had been none left over to wonder what he would do with his new, masterless life.

“I want so many things. Like you, I think there must be something better to praise, and I want to find it. But I don’t wish to leave the road yet. I want to see far-off countries—to cross the waters and walk through the ancient forests whence our people came. To go to Rome and Byzantium and learn the songs and wisdom of their people.

“And I want to do all of this with a friend by my side.” He looked sidelong at the dapper old man and wondered quite suddenly whether the rules of such friendships were different inside the cloister. He had once heard a rumour that God held every man, slave or free, male or female, of equal importance. A strange and puzzling idea, fit perhaps for a utopia that could not exist outside these convent walls.

“You have a friend in mind?”

Leofgar laughed, for thinking of Wulfstan made his heart lighter. “I do. Chance met—if chance it was—on the road. He is in search of something here too, redemption, or a better purpose. A very untypical warrior, it seemed to me, though a deadly one. Can a man have the heart of one thing and the outer appearance of another, without becoming that which he appears to be?”

“It depends on the strength of the heart.” Gewis opened the door more fully. A shaft of mild yellow sunlight struck through like a spear and glimmered on the gold leaf of the broken screen. “It is best if seeming and being become one, but the change can happen either way. You will not praise a warrior’s dedication to death—his willingness to protect, to set himself as a shield in front of his people, but you travel with one? Does he know you despise him?”

“I do nothing of the sort!” Leofgar felt stabbed by the accusation, shocked at receiving such a blow from so old and seemingly harmless a man. “I have said, haven’t I, that he is not like the men who see their prowess with the sword as superior to all other learning. He’s not like those who make you bow or be broken. He is…”

This wasn’t Leofgar’s secret to share, but it clawed to get out while it could. He didn’t know if he would ever again have anything like a father to turn to, and he was weary of trying to puzzle this out on his own.

“If anything he is too soft,” he dared. “Too yielding to be a proper man. If I was to have contempt for him…” …
which I don’t. I do not.
“It would be because of that, not because he is the killer he was raised and trained to be.”

Gewis gave a smile that should have been reassuring, but for the flicker in his moss-green eyes. Leofgar had the feeling that Gewis had understood both the said and unsaid meanings of his words, as a true scop should.

“You think yielding is weakness?” Gewis walked over to that broken screen, taking away the bucket of brushes that stood in front of it. With a shoulder braced under one edge, he angled it so that the picture came more fully into the light.

It blazed as though it were painted out of suns and showed Leofgar Christ on the cross, his feet pinned together with one long nail, his hands spiked separately and the blood running down his wrists.

“Do you think he was weak?”

Leofgar recognised Anna’s teaching style. Because he recognised it, he reined in the pious, unthinking “No!” that was his first response. Anna had drummed it into him to think of reasons for his responses before he gave them. Thus he replaced rote denial with, “He was…is the maker of all things that were made. Everything that is takes its strength from him, and without him all would fall to nothingness. So he is stronger than all things. No, I don’t think him weak.”

Gewis smiled at the crucifix as a cloud outside cut off the sun, and the goldwork became less dazzling. “Yet he chose to be stripped and pierced and shamed before all men, to lose all honour and his life with it. Out of this utter defeat, he brought forth victory not only for himself but for all the world, for those who had died before him and those who would die after.”

Leofgar’s understanding of the world twisted at the words, the way a riddle twists in the mind just before it gives up its answer. Something had changed, something been done afresh. He had comprehended something in his heart and his guts that had not quite reached his mind yet.

“Weakness is strength?” Leofgar tried to fit the revelation into words, but the phrase made no sense.

Gewis laughed and smoothed down the long white hair that ringed his shaved crown.

“Yielding is not weakness,” Leofgar tried again, and although some part of him clamoured that this was as nonsensical as the first, another part—the changed part—sighed in relief. This was not quite right either, but it was closer.

Abruptly, he wanted to go racing down the slope at the end of the abbey garden shouting it at the top of his lungs. It didn’t fully express what he had understood, but it would do, and such a fierce flood of joy and relief, understanding, revelation and goodness accompanied it that he wanted to tell the world and keep telling them until they understood it too.

A stir at the inner doorway brought a scent of candles and cabbage into the room. Dark shapes crowded through the narrow entrance and emerged as three strapping young monks.

Gewis edged to the end of the largest organ pipe, giving him a look of apology for the interruption. “Happily you have come at the perfect time to hear this noble instrument give voice for the first time. Lend me a hand there, and we will take this into the church.”

So Leofgar hitched Lark and Hierting more firmly onto his back and took an end of wooden pipe. The other monks disposed themselves along it, sharing the weight, while the carpenter and his lad walked alongside as idly as lords.

Rather than take it out of the inner door, through the scriptorium and the dormitories, they processed with dignity into the gardens and around the outside, acquiring curious onlookers along the way. When the pipe turned the corner of the men’s building, onto the open space before the church, Leofgar saw the great trough of stone that lay there, filled with water for passersby and horses alike, now shining up at the sky a deep reflected blue. On the benches by its side, he saw Wulfstan sitting with a motherly woman in a faded blue dress and a white veil.

At the sight of Wulfstan, Leofgar’s heart again surprised him with joy. They had been apart scarcely two hours, and yet something in him had grown thin and faint with hunger in that time. Wulfstan was as food to him, made him breathe a sigh of relief and feel strong again.

When Wulfstan heard the clamour of all the folk surrounding the little procession, he looked up and, seeing Leofgar, broke into a smile like summer. Leofgar had the glad thought that Wulfstan felt the same famine and the same need for him.

Placing the first pipe down in the corner cleared for it, they went back for another. Gewis roped in half of the crowd to carry bellows and boards, pipes and pedals for him, sending the youngest monk to run to the cellarer and fetch beer for his impromptu labourers.

By this means, it took no time at all for all the pieces of the organ to be deposited in place. Perhaps the onlookers would have stayed to watch it assembled but that immediately afterward the monks and nuns of the community began filing into the church for the office of None. That chased away the idlers and those who had turned up simply for the free beer, and left only a few pilgrims and pious townsfolk to fill in the spaces left by the clergy.

Leofgar had never seen so many holy people in one place—the floor could not be seen for dark woolen habits, and he was awed by the beauty of the plainsong, men and women chanting together as though lifted and lapped by a musical sea.

Halfway through the short office, Wulfstan pushed through the crowd to stand next to him. If they wriggled a little, they could put themselves behind the propped-up pipes and hear the service without being seen. The smile passed between them again, Leofgar feeling it over all of his skin like strong sunlight.

There was something different about Wulfstan—a lightness in his eyes and his step that had not been there before. At the sight of it, the better part of him rejoiced, but the worst feared that he would no longer be needed, that he had been replaced.

Under cover of the pipes, Wulfstan slipped his arm around Leofgar’s back. The warmth and the scent of him were like springtime after too much snow. This time nothing—no feeling that he should be appalled, no doubt about his own intentions, no guilt because what he wanted would lead to Wulfstan’s shame—nothing walled Leofgar away from accepting that comfort. It seemed strange to him that everything in him could be so changed with one single thought, and yet it was, and he was not fool enough to cling to shadows when the morning had come. So he leaned in until he was flush against the other man’s side and smiled until it ached.