Daughter of the Wolf (58 page)

Thancrad had withdrawn into the bows, his face closed.

Auli leaned down and kissed Finn on the forehead, and then drew his eyelids down with the first and second fingers of her right hand. She said something under her breath, but Elfrun did not hear.

All her senses seemed to have left her. She could only see grey, hear nothing but the rush of the blood in her ears, taste and smell nothing but ashes, her body numb and cold.

Not even tears.

Not even breath.

There was a hand on her shoulder, and then she felt herself being drawn into a warm embrace. It was Auli, and Elfrun let herself lean, let the other girl support her. She could feel Auli's breath warm on her neck, and her hands on her shoulder blades, and for a long moment they clung together, kneeling in the bloody water. They were interlaced in perfect balance, each holding the other, stopping the other from falling. It was bitter, and sweet. Elfrun had never in her life been so close to a girl her own age as she was to this foreigner, with whom she could not exchange a single word.

The boat heaved and lurched again. It was Tuuri. He took in the scene at a glance, and said something in an alien tongue which was self-evidently blasphemous, turning and punching the side of the boat as he swore, bloodying his knuckles.

Auli let Elfrun go gently, and turned to her father. She was pointing to the shore, and to the boat, miming the fight as well as presumably describing it. Elfrun looked back to where the tide was washing the long, dark shape of Athulf's body to and fro. Would anybody care to bury him?

Tuuri was looking at Thancrad, face tight, but Auli said something else, and he relaxed. Other men were splashing out to the boats. Smoke was trickling up from beyond the trees.

‘Tilmon?' Elfrun asked. ‘Switha?' She too glanced at Thancrad.

Tuuri gave his infectious, broken-toothed grin. ‘They made a big mistake. Let themselves be outnumbered. A second, bigger one. Barred themselves in their hall.' It took a long moment for his meaning to sink in, but when it did she turned and looked again at Thancrad, properly this time. He too was watching the smoke, like a fledgling bespelled by a snake. Darker now, and thicker, beginning to billow up above the trees and eddy sideways away from them in the wind. The crackling of flame was faintly audible.

‘
Blis!
The horses!' Thancrad had blenched under his tan, his mouth a square black hole of terror. He scrabbled for the side of the boat, but Tuuri put out a hand. ‘
Nej
, lad. We've not fired the stables.'

Elfrun thought of the hundred clear yards between hall and stable-block. The breeze was off the sea. They should be safe enough. But just one rogue spark might do it.

Thancrad had stopped, his mouth working. ‘Even so,' and he was clearly battling for self-possession, ‘the smell of the smoke... I can't just leave her there. Her and the others.'

His parents, trapped in the burning hall, drawn swords to drive them back at every door; and all he could think of was the horses? But Elfrun thought she understood. Switha and Tilmon had brought this down on themselves, warp and weft of their fate woven on a loom they had built and strung with their own hands. The horses, though, were guiltless.

And Tuuri seemed to understand as well. He barked an order, and one of his men set off back up the beach, as fast as he could stumble over weed and dune. ‘He will lead the horses down here, and hobble them. Will that do?'

Thancrad nodded, a little muscle twitching in his jaw.

Auli grasped her father's sleeve and said something in that high clear voice like a bird chirping. Tuuri nodded. ‘Alvrun?'

She jumped. Everything still seemed so thin and dim and far away.

‘My daughter wishes you to know that, had he lived, she would have given Finn to you as your own.'

Her own? Elfrun blinked and shook her head like a dog with a flea in its ear. The words made no sense. How could such a quicksilver soul as Finn be owned, or bought, or given?

How could the lady of Donmouth love a slave, or a freed-man?

Better, maybe, that he was beyond all that. Gone like the summer geese or the winter swallows, to some place she knew nothing of. She half opened her mouth, to ask about the faded lattice of scars on his back, and then closed it again. None of that mattered now, with his body cooling at her feet in the bilge water which slopped to and fro with the rocking of the boat. His blood had sunk and settled, a lower, darker layer.

Finn's death was impossible, and yet it was the only solid thing in her shifting, restless world, caught between smoke and water. There was no profit in fighting it.

She looked back at the rising smoke of Illingham, and then across the glittering water to Donmouth. She had never seen her home from the seaward side before. Where to go now, and what to do?

She was lord of Donmouth. And Thancrad, she supposed, was now the lord of Illingham. Until the king chose otherwise.

That was what they had to do.

‘The king.' She had spoken aloud. ‘Osberht. We must tell him.'

Thancrad turned his eyes away from the smoke. ‘York. The king is in York, with the archbishop.'

Tuuri nodded, half turning to wave at his men on the shore. ‘We can take you, up the Humber and the Ouse.' He grinned, and laughed a laugh with no mirth in it. ‘But you will forgive me if we do not come with you, into Osberht's hall.'

Elfrun nodded. ‘That would be a great kindness.' She turned and looked at Auli, who was sitting back on her heels gazing down at Finn's body. Even soaked and bloodstained, the stranger girl had a swanlike composure to her, her neat head so graceful on her long neck. Those amber eyes, with their trowie light. And Elfrun gave a laugh, a little, bitter thing which caught in her belly and her throat. ‘You got something wrong, Auli. Blood, yes, and fire. But shallow water.'

Cobnuts, this time. Another of the simple, finely plaited little rush baskets, and a couple of dozen nuts tucked inside. Fredegar stood in the church doorway looking down at the gift in his hands and shaking his head. An ordinary enough object: the hedgerows were ripe, even overladen, but the basket was cunningly woven and the nuts laid carefully within, giving value to the everyday.

When he looked up the girl-child stood in front of him. The smith's child, the one who had stayed on with him at the forge when the wife had taken the little ones back to her father's house. He had tried to speak to them, but there was a wall of silence there. He had wanted to explain to the woman why he had done what he had done, that it had been done with the smith's blessing, that the boy would almost certainly have died in the end, after slow agony.

All empty words, to justify the unjustifiable. He had killed Cudda merely to soothe his own distress, because he could not bear to see the pain.

And now this girl. She had a bruise on one cheek, he noticed. He held out the basket of nuts.

‘From you,' he said. It was not a question.

She nodded.

‘Everything was from you – flowers, hare, strawberries.'

‘The little cross.' It was barely a whisper.

He tugged it out from the collar of his robe and showed it to her, and something relaxed in her taut, pointed little face. He nodded, thinking. ‘Why?'

Her eyes flickered to the church door.

‘Come on then.' There was a long bench along the back, for those such as Abarhild who could not stand for the length of the mass. Fredegar sat down in the dimness, and indicated that the child should do the same, but instead she stood in front of him, plaiting her fingers together, twisting one ankle round the other in unselfconscious agony. It made him uncomfortable to watch. What was tormenting this child? It came to him that he couldn't remember her name, and he said as much.

‘Wynn,' she whispered.

Joy
. It seemed ridiculously inapposite for this whey-faced little creature.

He took the cross from around his neck for the first time in months and looked at it properly again. The bone was warm from his skin. ‘This must have taken many hours.'

She nodded.

‘You are a craftsman.'

The first flicker of something lively in her eyes.

‘Why have you been bringing me gifts?'

He could see her swallowing, running a dry tongue over her lips, trying to find words, to meet his eye. At last she took in a sharp breath, and fixed him with her blue stare. Then, very fast, ‘To say thank you.'

That took him aback. ‘To
thank
me? For what?'

‘You made it all right.'

‘I made it...' He was feeling stupid. He looked at the little cross. She had made it, not him.

‘
Cudda
,' she said, and burst into tears.

Feeling helpless, Fredegar put out his hands and she grabbed them with astonishing force and clutched them to her face. ‘Child.'

Her grief was astonishing, like a wind from nowhere that tears through the woods, blasting branches and toppling oaks. Her whole body shook with the force of her sobs, and she pressed his knuckles ever harder into her eye-sockets as though trying to gouge out her own eyes rather than to stem the flow of tears.

And she was silent, or as nearly silent as someone crying her heart out can be. Gasps, and snuffles, but never a sob.

Fredegar let her grip his hands, and waited for the storm to blow itself out. And he thought.
Cudda
. And she wanted to thank him for making it all right.

Was it possible that this child would understand? That the forgiveness he sought could be found at her hands?

The spasms were fewer, further apart, less frantic. But still he said nothing, just let her clutch his hands to her eyes and weep.

At last she gulped one last time, and stood back a little, still holding his hands. She was staring down at them, the sallow skin, her tears still wet on the prominent knuckles. Fredegar too stared at his hands as though he had never seen them before.

Her left hand gripped his right in a sudden convulsion. ‘This hand?'

‘This hand what?'

‘You killed Cudda with this hand, and my father's knife.'

He nodded slowly.

She slipped her hands from his and held them out to him. ‘I pushed him with both.' Her face and voice were flat.

Her words sank into his brain as though into deep and murky water, swaying and settling into the silt.

After a moment he said, ‘On purpose?' But he knew, he didn't need her nod.

‘You were angry?'

A little shrug. ‘He was drunk again. He was laughing at me, again.'

‘But you never meant to hurt him?' He was offering her a reprieve, a way out of the net, and he could see she understood. But she lifted her pointed little face and stuck out her chin, the tendons of her neck taut.

‘It's not that easy. I meant to hurt him. I don't know if I meant to kill him, but I wanted him to die.'

‘But' – and he had to be clear about this – ‘you did not mean for him to fall in the fire and be burned?'

She shook her head, a little frightened gesture, eyes huge, and he was reminded how very young she was.

‘Oh, child.' He remembered her name. ‘Wynn. Living with other people is the hardest thing God asks of us.'

‘I thought he would just stumble. I was going to run. I thought he'd lam me. But he tripped on the stone, and he fell, and he didn't get up. He fell in the fire!' Her voice went up, and he heard the scream building and he grabbed her hands again and clung on until she was breathing once more. ‘And I didn't try to get him out. I thought he was faking it. And then I could smell burning. Him. Burning. Smelling like a roast.' She shuddered. ‘I couldn't look. I just ran.'

Fredegar could feel his own heart pounding. The shock of finding the boy so damaged was very present to him. He had not been thinking, he realized now, that day in the forge. He had moved in an eerie calm, administering the last rites, and despatching the boy, and then haranguing Ingeld to admit the body into the minster turf, as though burial so close to the altar of the sacred mysteries would somehow compensate for a life unshriven. As though ending Cudda's pain and digging a hole in holy ground through which the boy's soul might just find its way to paradise would somehow make amends for all the pain at Noyon, for the slaughter that he alone had somehow survived. He uncurled his fingers and she slipped her hands from his.

‘You made it go away,' she whispered.

He shook his head. ‘It will never go away. Look at me, Wynn.' Obedient, she lifted her gaze. ‘You have to confront what you have done, just as I do. What we have done, and what we have failed to do. And we have to be sorry, so sorry that it breaks our hearts again every day for the rest of our lives.'

Her face was frowning, intent. She nodded.

‘But,' and he lifted a hand, though she had not so much as opened her mouth, and as he spoke he realized that he had never allowed himself to think these thoughts before, ‘but we must not take up guilt that does not belong to us. God hates that as much as he hates the proper guilts we don't admit. You were angry with your brother. You pushed him. Terrible things came of it, but your intention was so much less than your deed.' Could she possibly understand?

He wondered if he should tell her about Noyon, about how he had rung the bell that – without him knowing – had been the signal for the attack, when all the pilgrims and all the tenants, all the brethren but him alone, had already been on their way to the church for the great mass.

Ring the bell, and unleash the Devil.

‘No.' He hadn't realized he had spoken the word aloud until her pale face swam back into view, frowning at him.

He half smiled and shook his head. He was helping her to set down her burden. Could she do the same for him? Perhaps he would go to York and make his confession to some minster priest; and perhaps not. Had Ratramnus sent him here as his penance? They would make Heahred first priest, and then abbot of Donmouth. He knew that now. But if his place were here he would have to try and do better, put down the burden of guilt and take up the one of love, with more force than he done hitherto.