Brothers of the Wild North Sea (43 page)

He stripped off his cassock and fumbled in the dark for his woollen nightshirt. Barda had made a batch of the garments for the monks when the autumn nights began to cool. A true ascetic would have refused her, but Cai had been too glad of the gift to refuse it for any of his brethren, who spent their nights warmer if itchier for her generosity. He shrugged into his and lay down. He would say his prayers later, he told himself. He would have the strength for them once he’d visited his dreams.

A shoulder touched his. Biting back a yelp of fright, Cai sprang out of his bunk. He retreated until the hut’s curved wall stopped him, reaching for the sword that lived in here with him now that the armoury was gone. “Who is that?”

Silence. Had Broccus somehow made good on his offer to send him a girl? Perhaps he’d intended it all along, brought the poor lass with him, hidden under sheep or sacks of grain. With an effort Cai stopped the wild rush of speculation. “Speak, or you’ll be sorry for it. Who is there?”

“Caius, it’s…it’s me. Oslaf.”

Cai let go the sword along with a pent-up breath. The weapon thudded onto the earthen floor. “Oslaf? What in God’s name are you doing here?” He grabbed at possibilities and found one that didn’t make his hair stand on end. “Are you sick? Did you come here to find me?”

“I should say that, shouldn’t I? That I felt ill, came here and…fell asleep on your bunk while I was waiting?”

Crouching, Cai sheathed the sword. He hung it up again, then retrieved the lantern from its niche and re-lit it by feel, his flint striking sparks before the wick caught. A soft glow filled the cell, revealing Oslaf sitting upright in the bunk, his hair dishevelled, his pallor lending credence to his story. And if it was true, he had kindly undressed in readiness for Cai’s examination. He was an attractive lad, skinny but no longer starvation-thin. His skin was smooth and unmarred, a hazelnut brown in the lamplight, scattered with freckles.

“Oh God,” Cai whispered. “You’d better tell me the truth.”

“Not if you stand there like Judgement. I can’t.”

“Like Judgement?”

“As if you’re about to point at me, call me an abomination and throw me out, like—”

“Oslaf!” Cai slung the lantern over a hook. He knelt on the bunk and took the boy into his arms, pulling up the blanket to warm him. “Of course I’m not. How can you?”

“I’m sorry. But you’ve been different lately. You know you have.”

“Aye. And if you don’t know why, no one does.”

Oslaf laid his head on Cai’s shoulder. Cai knew the nature of the convulsion that went through him—the heave of a grief too deep for tears, dry and terrible. He held him until it had passed. Oslaf said, “I do know.” His voice was worn to rags. “I do know. I’ve been watching you, and I’ve seen you dying inside your skin, just like I did after Ben. When your father came tonight, I thought he was going to pick you up and take you home, like my grandmother did when you summoned her.”

“Not Broc’s style.” Cai rocked the boy, pressed an absent kiss to his brow. “Still, he was kinder than I’d thought.”

“Yes. He’s like you. And you’re
so
like him. I can see how you’ll be when you’re older—strong and tough, but compassionate too, and shining with your learning. I want to be with a man like that.”

Cai frowned. This view of his resemblance to the old man was too startling to take in all at once. “You
will
be with me. As long as the Fara brethren are together—”

“No. With you as Benedict was with me. As you were with… Cai, I’ve grown afraid to say his name to you.”

Cai knew why. He’d been walking around with his grief held before him like a frozen shield, deflecting all attempts at human kindness. “I’m sorry. Say it.”

“With you like Fen was, then. What can be the harm? Yours is over the sea, and mine is…” He choked faintly. “Mine is under the earth. We can comfort each other. You don’t need to show it in the daytime, Cai, not to the others. But I can come into your bed at night, and you can touch me—warm yourself on me, lose your pain for a while in my flesh. And…I can lose mine.”

“No,” Cai said softly. “You can’t.” Oslaf had lifted his head. He was nose-to-nose with Cai now. His lips were parted, his breath sweet with the mead that had given him the courage to come here. To kiss him would have been easy—the easiest thing in the world. But Cai knew he could lay him down here, wring pleasure from both their bodies from now until dawn, and make no real difference to either of them. “You can’t lose it. You can only learn to live with it, and that’s not the way.”

Oslaf thumped a fist off his shoulder. “Why not? What
is
the bloody way?”

“I don’t know. I’m beginning to think…time. Only time.”

“That’s no use to me. I want you now.”

“Lie down.”

Oslaf sucked a breath. Despite his declarations, he was rigid in Cai’s arms. Fear as well as arousal rolled off him in waves. Cai turned him so that he was lying with his back pressed to Cai’s belly. Once more he adjusted the blanket to cover the poor naked limbs.

“When I lie here at night,” he said, “I have so many stories about Fen that go through my head. I can’t seem to get at them during the day.” Oslaf had lapsed into listening stillness, and Cai stroked his hair. “I certainly can’t tell them to anyone else. That’s why I’ve been…such a block of ice, I suppose. Is it like that with Benedict too?”

“Yes. But I don’t want to think about it. I just want—”

“You do.”

“No! Why can’t you be like the others? They’re afraid to say his name to me, and I don’t want to make them weep and pat my head and not know what to do with themselves by saying it to them.”

“It’s always so when someone dies or…goes away. Death is too big for us. We jump to get out of its way.”

“Not you, though.”

Cai held him tight. “No, not me. Tell me a story about Benedict. Just one.”

“If you will tell me one about Fen.”

Shrugging, Cai nodded. Oslaf’s hair was soft. His body was lithe, coming to a fine, strong maturity. Everything about him was sweet and good and right, and utterly wrong. “Very well. You first.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“From the beginning, if you like.”

“The beginning…” Suddenly Oslaf twisted over onto his back, pushed his fringe out of his eyes and looked into the long-vanished world beyond the stone hut’s roof. His head was pillowed comfortably on Cai’s arm. “I remember. My brother Bertwald brought me here. He hated you lot, you know—he thought you were going to whip me or crucify me for the good of my soul. And as I was half-dragging him up the track, this fine tall man—not even in a cassock—it was a hot day, I remember, and Theo must have let him work in a shirt… This fine tall man pulled his ox to a halt in the field and asked us if we were all right. Well, Bertie’s a farmer too, and I had to stand there in the blazing heat for an hour while the two of them talked about how Ben got his plough rows so straight.”

Oslaf chuckled. “Bertie was almost a convert, though I’m not sure he knew what to. And my first night here, when I had bad dreams and woke up shouting for my grandmother… Ben had the cell next to mine. I hadn’t really looked at him at supper or during prayers. He knocked on my door, and I was so surprised to see my ploughman there. He sat on the edge of my bunk and talked to me until I fell asleep—all about Theo, everything I’d learn to be and do…”

In the first faint silvering of dawn, Cai left the hut. He paused for a moment in the doorway. Oslaf was curled up tight in the blanket, sleeping with the thoroughness of exhausted grief.

Cai hadn’t told a single story about Fen. He smiled, pulling the willow screen over the door. Oslaf had talked all night. After a while he had forgotten Cai was there and begun to address something or someone beyond the hut’s confines, and he had confided to that vast and merciful unknown the whole history of his time with Ben, from their first awkward kiss to the alien misery of Ben’s estrangement from him, a deeper hell than any Aelfric could have devised. Cai had let him run on. He had taken the boy’s drooping head on his shoulder when finally he had lapsed into sleep, and lain wide-eyed himself.

Maybe it was just lack of sleep that was gilding the sunrise, but Cai had never seen a more beautiful one at Fara. The silver was turning to a fresh rose gold. The eastern horizon was clear, a thin arc of sun already poised over the water. Once the whole orb had risen, Cai’s duties would begin—leading his brethren in prayers, seeing they all got a sufficient breakfast, assigning them their labours for the day. Such a sunrise should be seen from the dunes. He had just enough time.

The tide had swept the beach clean. The only marks on it were those of the water’s pure dance, ripples and sandbanks whose crests were beginning to dry out already and catch diamond light from the sun. This was Cai’s earliest memory of it. Benedict had been instrumental in his own first days here—had brought him down to the sands to show him that his new life was not all self-discipline and Latin verbs. Cai, itching for exercise, had run like a lunatic along the shoreline, splashing his new cassock to the waist. The sand had been like a blank canvas and so had he, for all his turbulent upbringing with Broc. Now when he settled among the long grasses and looked down, every inch of the strand was marked for him in event. Here the sea had brought Fen to him. Here they had fought, and once boldly fucked in the open, a thick sea mist keeping their secret. Here Fen had taken Gleipnir, the cord that could bind when fetters failed, and kissed Cai on the head and walked away.

Cai had done everything he could. He had filled his days, and endless insomniac nights, with every good action Theo could ever have prescribed for him. He had worked until his body failed, and then strapped his mind to the plough and read and learned until his vision had turned to dazzle. He had subdued his sorrows in the griefs of others—sat with new widows and widowers, with mothers of stillborn children. He had taught his brethren and the villagers, guided their minds and physicked their bodies.

He might as well have sat here on the dunes and moped from dawn till dusk, for all the good he’d done himself. The weary pain inside him had never ceased, and he was so lonely he wanted to fill up his pockets with rocks and walk out into the sea. Fen had imagined a moon-bridge that brought souls together before they met in the flesh. Perhaps Cai could follow the track of this rising sun on the water, leave his aching skin and bones behind him with his cassock and…

He jerked upright, scattering sand, sliding halfway down the dune before he could stop himself. What was he thinking? He had spent the night immersed in Oslaf’s griefs—had begun to mix them with his own. Fen wasn’t lying cold and still beneath the soil. He was vividly alive somewhere, perhaps riding Eldra hard across the Dane Land marshes, pursuing his duty as sincerely as Cai had tried to follow his own.

Tried and failed. He couldn’t do it anymore. What was the point of it all, if one day Fen came home and
he
was lying under the damn hawthorns? Cai had seen the look in his father’s eyes, unsentimental and accurate, sizing him up. His lung was sticking to the inside of his ribs, or so it felt, and each day it hurt him more to breathe. He’d known it to happen with deep wounds like this one—scar tissue forming too fast, too abundantly, binding and strangling where it should heal.

He scrambled back up the dunes. If he was going to follow the track of the dawn sun, it had better be soon.
Now,
his racing heart told him.
Go now. Go now.
He could take one of the ponies Broc had brought. No. If he was going to leave Fara, desert his brethren, he’d take nothing with him but the clothes on his back. A huge, sick exultation rose up in him. He would go. Each step he took—down the long track to the Tyne, and then further south still, down maybe as far as Eboracum where trading ships set out across the North Sea—would carry him closer to Fen. God, it was strange—now that he’d made his decision, he could almost catch his lover’s scent in the air. A sense of his own failure clawed at him, but he was past caring.

“Fen,” he gasped, stumbling out onto the slope where the beehive cells lay curled and dreaming in the day’s first light. “Fen, I’m on my way.”

Chapter Nineteen

Leaving was easy after all. Cai did it in a handful of sun-shadowed minutes, in still waters at the turn of the monastery’s tide. He shooed Oslaf gently out of his bed, before it could be said that the abbot of Fara had a new friend and a short memory, and he washed and dressed himself as if for any day.

He breakfasted with his men, noting with detached approval that Oslaf had colour in his face and that he went back for a second slice of Hengist’s fresh bread. He met the boy’s grateful gaze steadily. Afterwards he sat with Hengist among the grain sacks Broccus had brought, which were piled up in the covered part of the church for want of other space, and the two of them went through the tough, basic arithmetic of supply and demand. There would be enough to last the winter—just. If there were no more raids.

When Cai left the church, a blazing autumn day was unfurling its wings. The sunlight held a crystal chill of summer’s end. The shadows were blue-black, deep. The men of Fara had gone to the fields, or to help in the villagers’ dairy and barns. The place was as still as a starling’s nest with all its noisy fledglings flown. Cai changed into his travelling clothes and unhitched his sword from the wall of his hut. After a short tussle with his conscience, he took one of Broc’s horses after all. The others had survived the raid, and maybe this one could be spared. Leading it to a drystone wall so he could clamber on—a leap he had used to make without thinking—Cai reflected that he had no choice. Even this much exertion had left him coughing and fighting for air. He was going to the Dane Lands, and if he tried it on foot he would get as far as Godric’s southern pastures and probably die there amongst his cows. Everything was silent. He turned the horse’s head towards the track that led out across the mud flats.