Against a Darkening Sky

by Lauren B. Davis

  She prods him away from the graves, away from the dead, and everything is fine until they reach the hut she once shared with Touilt. When he sees Ricbert’s body swaying from the tree, he begins to beat his chest and tear at his skin with his nails. She uses all her strength to pull his hands from his face.

  “Stop it, Egan! Stop it!”

  “He died for me! He died for my sins!” Egan breaks away and runs to Ricbert’s body. He pulls at the feet, and for a moment Wilona fears they will come off in his hands, or the head will separate from the body.

  “Let go, you can do nothing for him.” Something pops, tears. Gagging, she pries his fingers open and drags him away.

  He is so weak from exhaustion and hunger that she’s able to overpower him without struggle. This gives her some reassurance, for if, in the grip of some delusion, he attacks her, she’s confident she can repel him. Still, she doesn’t want to hurt him. His eyes are fixed on Ricbert, tears streaming, mouth gasping in spasms. Before she knows she is going to do it, Wilona slaps him across the face. His head snaps back but his hands remain at his sides. He blinks several times. He looks like a small boy. His chin trembles.

  “Forgive me,” she says, and puts her arm around his shoulders. “We’ll come back and help Brother Ricbert tomorrow, yes? He’ll be safe where he is until then. The animals can’t get to him.” She doesn’t want to think about the bodies in the cart, what condition they’ll be in tomorrow with no one to guard them through the long night. Egan rocks back and forth, and she worries he’ll collapse again. “Brother Egan, don’t you think you should say a prayer for Brother Ricbert? Shouldn’t you say the words to bring him to Christ’s heaven? That’s your responsibility, isn’t it?” He gazes at her, locked within whatever maze of horrors his mind has become. “Pray for him, Brother Egan. Pray for him.”

  The words must reach him, for he gathers himself and his features rearrange into something like his old self. “You are right again, Sister.”

  Egan kneels in the wet earth just in front of the swaying corpse and makes the sign of the cross. She cannot tell what words he intones, for although his lips move he speaks softly. Wilona finds herself wanting to kneel down with him. Not to pray to the Christian god, but to honour her old friend. She sits back on her heels, tilts her face, and looks up into the mist-grey sky and the raindrops, pearls tumbling from the fingers of an unbearably distant god. It makes her dizzy and she closes her eyes. The cold water runs into her hair. Be at peace, Ricbert. Find a home somewhere and rest there. Know you will be remembered. Her insignificance strikes her; she’s nothing but an ant under the absurdly remote sky, a speck of dust on the monstrous body of the earth.

  When she opens her eyes, Egan stands before her with a blank, hopeless expression on his face. She pushes herself up with her hands and wipes the mud on her skirt. She suspects she’ll never be clean again. “Come, Egan. I’m too weary to fight with you.”

  He says nothing but follows behind like a lamb. As they walk along the rain-pocked river, Wilona notices debris caught at the banks, bits of wood and leaves and cloth, but other than an unsettling hank of blond hair wrapped around a floating branch, there’s no sign of human death. The river is healing itself, dragging all the ugly things to the bottom, where they’ll be eaten by turtles and fish; or casting them out, where the beasts of land and air will make whatever use of them they can. In another moon everything will be as it was on the river, as though Cadwallon’s horror never happened.

  When they arrive at the cave, she’s as delighted as her fatigue and grief will allow to see that the brambles she threw over the entrance are undisturbed. She laughs, startling Egan, when two chickens run from the underbrush and eye her accusingly, reprimanding her for leaving them alone. Egan gazes down at the river from the flat rock, and Wilona pulls him back from the edge, fearing he might cast himself in. If he does, she won’t jump in after him. Enough is enough.

  “Pull those brambles away, Egan. Make yourself useful.”

  He grasps the thorny branches with his bare hands. Spots of bright red blood appear on his stained flesh.

  “For the love of Thunor! Wake up, man. Use your tunic round your hands. Must I treat you like a simpleton?”

  She realizes she’s using the same tone Touilt used with her in her first weeks in the village, when she was as blasted with shock as Egan is now. Touilt tolerated no silliness, as she called it, no mooning. Wilona later nursed a sort of resentment of the seithkona’s crusty manner, especially when she’d so craved a mother’s comfort, but now, looking at how easy it would be for Egan to crumble into nothingness, she gains a new respect for Touilt’s wisdom. He nods, and twists the cloth of his ragged tunic round his hands.

  When the entrance is clear and she swings back the woven door, her heart pounds. It may just be her imagination, but she smells her attackers’ rancid, salty, ale-infused stench. It wraps around her head, over her mouth and nose like the fat fingers of the turnip-nosed one.

  “There’s wood drying under the animal shed’s overhang, Egan. Bring some in.”

  Something in the hawthorn bushes on the far side of the sty snaps her to attention. She jerks her dagger from her belt. Egan will be no help in a fight, or will he? His eyes are focused on the spot, his teeth bared. He draws his cross and opens his mouth.

  “No!” She points her finger at him, silencing him as she would a child. “Stay.”

  She picks up a rock and hurls it into the bushes. It thuds to the ground, and she swears she hears a whine, a whimper. Whatever it is, it’s hurt. One of the shoats? A sheep crawled off to die? She picks up her spear and inches toward the bush. Egan mutters behind her—prayers, she supposes—and she knows she cannot stop him. She rattles the edge of the hawthorn. Something stirs. She sees a leg, animal, grey fur, wolfish, edible. She raises the spear, is about to lunge, when the shape moves again: an enormous anvil of a head, bloody, matted fur.

  “Bana!”

  The great tail thumps weakly on the ground.

  “Bana, Bana!” She hacks at the branches with the spear, careless of the scratches or the pain in her hand. “Come on, boy. Good dog, wonderful dog!”

  Her throat closes, and her face contorts as the tears come again. The dog is in terrible shape. There’s a large wound on his neck, another on his back leg, one eye closed and seeping putrid matter. And yet still the big tongue, woolly with dehydration, tries to lick her hand.

  “Egan, come here, right now! Help me.”

  As gently as possible, they half carry, half drag the dog back to the cave. “Find a bowl inside. Get me water from the river, now!”

  Egan does as he’s told, and when he brings it back she drips water into the dog’s mouth, and then, to her delight, his tongue begins to lap from the bowl.

  “Christ has protected your dog, Sister. It’s a sign of His compassion.” Egan caresses the dog’s head.

  He’s an idiot. Where was Christ’s compassion for his new followers? But she’s not inclined to argue. She covers the dog’s head with kisses and examines his wounds. They’re slashes more than punctures, except for the eye, which she fears he’ll lose. She bathes his wounds, and packs them with betony, honey, and moss. The eye she cleanses as best she can, and she’s amazed that he lets her.

  When she’s done all she can, she and Egan move the dog inside and get to the work of fire and food. She cuts some juniper and rowan boughs from nearby, knowing their smoke will sweeten the air. While Egan gathers wood and builds a fire, she roots through the cave. Mice have been at the oats but have only opened one corner of the sack. It doesn’t look as though they’ve nested inside. The baskets of root vegetables, kept at the coldest end of the cave, are intact as well.

  Soon a simple stew of barley and vegetables bubbles over the fire, and they are sitting in steaming clothes, as close to the flames as they safely can. She mashes stew with her fingers, feeding it to Bana. It’s pitch black outside now, a silent, moonless night. Wilona spoons the food into bowls and fills two lea
ther cups with hot barley-water and honey.

  “Drink. It’ll battle the chill.” She wishes she’d not used the word battle.

  Egan seems to swallow his food without chewing. A little colour returns to his face, and even the skin on his feet and legs appears less like the flesh of a corpse. He scratches his armpit. He must be covered in vermin. Her own scalp itches. Now that her appetite is appeased for the moment and she feels warm for the first time in days, exhaustion rolls over her like a rock. It’s all she can do to crawl to her pallet. It’s damp and she throws a fur over it. “Egan, use whatever you like for a bed. There are furs there.” She points to her bundle.

  In his right mind he would not try to violate her, not with those vows of his, but he’s not in his right mind. She watches him from under half-closed lids but sees only tremors and twitches in his sticklike limbs. Still, best to be cautious. She tucks her dagger under her hip, the hilt at her fingertips. Even mad as he is, she can’t deny the strange comfort of his presence. He sits near the fire, wrapped in a deer hide, next to the dog. Now and then he twitches a shoulder, an arm, his neck, as though tendrils of guilt encircle him like mistletoe. He’d be useless in a fight, would probably run away. Running away like a hare into some warren at the first sign of trouble is doubtless how he survived Cadwallon’s massacre.

  “They came upon us while we slept,” he says, as though reading her mind. “We were ready. Would have left that very morning. I woke up and there was screaming. They were like ants, swarming, everywhere at once. The men ran out waving daggers and spears and swords, if they had them, but they are not … were not … fighting men. Perhaps it would have made no difference if we had left the village. They’d have caught us on the road. Although maybe then some of the women might have escaped, fled into the woods with the children. But the road is over so much open ground.”

  He’s rambling, talking more to himself than to Wilona. She puts her knuckle in her mouth. She wishes he’d stop. She wishes he’d keep going. She can’t bear to know. She needs to know.

  “I cannot pick up a weapon. It’s against all I believe in. But I ran out anyway and hoped death would be quick at least. Cadwallon was on a great grey horse, a pale horse, and I knew it was him. A terrible man, with black hair and great white teeth and the fierce blue eyes of a wolf. I held my cross out to him and asked him to stop this madness in the name of Christ.” Egan wipes his eyes with the heel of his hands. “He asked me if I was a Christian and I told him I was, that all these people were Christians. He said he, too, was a Christian and my heart rejoiced. And then he laughed. ‘And are you the priest here?’ he said. I told him I was no priest, just a monk ministering to these souls. He looked down from his horse and made the sign of the cross over me. He said I should be spared then, so I might pray for his soul and show Christian forgiveness. I asked him what he needed to be forgiven for, and he said, ‘You shall see.’ And he made sure I saw. Made me watch the women raped, the children speared, the men cut down. He made me watch him herd children into the houses and barricade the doors. He made me watch his men set the torches to the thatch while the mothers were kept from saving their babies at sword point. Three women, Roswitha among them, impaled themselves rather than listen to their children’s screams as they burned alive.” Egan makes a gagging noise and then sobs. “I begged them to kill me. I pleaded with them, but they refused. They laughed. They said Cadwallon needed my prayers.” His voice is garbled, strangled. “I don’t know why God won’t let me die.”

  “And where was your Christ then, Brother Egan? Where was he then?”

  The question seems to startle him, to bring him back to himself a little. He sighs. “My Lord Christ stood beside me, Sister, weeping, as he stands with me now.”

  “Had he no power to stop it, then?” In the end, Ricbert was right. One god was as good as another, since they were all useless.

  “God’s time is not our own. Christ will change the hearts of men, and then we will have the kingdom of heaven on earth. He will change the hearts of men.”

  What would the point be of telling Egan he’s an idiot? “Go to sleep. There’s work to be done tomorrow.” She closes her eyes and within moments the velvet luxury of sleep folds round her. It was strange how comforting another breathing body could be, strange how the ghosts kept their distance from the weak, fractured, dim-witted monk.

  “I cannot pick up a weapon,” he says softly.

  For a moment she thinks she’s dreaming, reliving his story, but no.

  “It is against everything I believe.” His eyes are wide in the firelight, and his hands clutch his cross.

  “Egan, hush. You have told me. Sleep.”

  And for a few moments he is quiet, but only a few.

  “I cannot pick up a weapon …”

  She shushes him again, this time more harshly, for a chill runs along her spine. She rolls to the cave wall and pulls the fur over her ears. He whispers now but cannot seem to stop talking. His voice is like a bee in the cave, buzzing, buzzing. She falls asleep with her fingers in her ears, and when she drifts into wakefulness during the night, she finds him rocking slightly, his lips still moving, his eyes fixed on the fire. When at last dawn comes, she’s surprised to find him snoring softly, curled on his side, wrapped in his furs, one hand on Bana’s back, the long end of the cross in his mouth like a child’s thumb.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Egan walks beside Wilona through the dead village, past the dead houses. The unforgiving wind whispers the names of the dead, and the shadows recall their features. He jumps at every movement, every skulking dog, every flapping bit of cloth, every crow. Phantoms linger along the hedgerows, peek out from the ditches, crouch on burned beams, not quite in focus but unmistakable. Wilona has wrapped a cloth over her mouth and nose, and only when Egan sees this does he notice the smell—pungent, sweet, thick, rancid—rising up from the ground. He’s numb, and knows this and doesn’t mind. There’s safety in numbness. But he’s distressed to be a burden on Wilona. She must tell him to put on a cloak, to eat the ducks she caught in a net and roasted over the fire, to drink the hot broth. He tries to do as he is told.

  They return to the cave every night to find Bana still alive, healing, his tail wagging with increasing enthusiasm. Egan tells Wilona it’s a holy miracle. As she cleans the dog’s eye, which is now nothing but a sunken socket, and smears honey on the wounds, she says nothing. One night the dog lies down next to Wilona’s pallet, and Egan watches as she kisses the top of his head. “Silly dog. Best of dogs,” she says.

  It is a holy moment, and he hides his tears from her, for he knows she already thinks he’s too soft. But he’s not soft, he’s emptied, a shell surrounding nothing. Every time he closes his eyes the horrors return, all the more agonizing for being caused by Cadwallon, a Christian. So what does that word mean, then? Christian. What does anything mean?

  His thoughts swirl. He longs for understanding. Every night he dreams, but only of horrors, never of his angel, never of peace. He tosses and turns on the hard bed of earth, clawing the dirt for signs of God.

  And every day he and Wilona bury the dead. On Lady Elfhild’s grave they place a wreath of mistletoe on a wooden cross.

  When the last body, one of the young swineherds, is in the ground, and the earth mounded above him, Egan and Wilona stand on either side of the grave. It’s a weird, unhinged moment. Tears roll down his face.

  “I don’t know what to do now,” he says. “I hadn’t thought I’d be alive.” He smiles a little, crooked smile. “You’ve denied me death, Sister.”

  “It will come for us sooner or later.”

  He leans on his shovel. “But what are we to do now? Should we try to walk to Bebbanburgh?”

  “And find Cadwallon waiting for us?”

  Egan shudders. “No, you’re right. It’s just … I have no purpose … I don’t know what God wants of me.”

  “Apparently he wants you to live.” She makes what sounds a little like a chuckle. “You se
em so disappointed. Well, Egan, if that’s what your God’s decided, then I think you’d best get on with it and indulge him. And that means, now that we’ve organized the dead, we must organize the living—ourselves. There’s no way of knowing what’s going on in the royal courts, or who’ll win the right to rule this land.”

  He squints and looks across the plain. Heavy, woollen-rough clouds tower across the sky, casting patchwork shadows across the land. The purple-grey mountain still stands, the sun still plays coyly behind the clouds. If he casts his gaze away from the slaughtered village, it’s possible to still see something marvellous, some clean and eternal thing. For the first time since the horror, a small wedge of peace works its way into his heart. The worst may not be over, but this storm at least is done. The dead are the dead. They are a clan of empty spaces in the world that will never again be filled, but surely they are in heaven. He slaps lightly at the sides of his face, as though waking himself up. “You’re the wisest of women.” He rubs his eyes and turns his attention to the burned-out buildings. “We have to see what can be salvaged. Everything matters.”

  “Exactly,” says Wilona. “Winter’s coming swiftly now. If we’re to see the spring, we must make use of every little thing.”

  They’re not surprised there’s not much to salvage from the village, and a sad task it is, picking through these scraps of lives—a child’s wooden boat, a woman’s broken comb, a shattered charred loom. But they retrieve two cooking pots, several axe heads, six deer hides, and two sacks of only slightly singed grain miraculously spared from fire by a sturdy bin. The gardens yield overlooked turnips, parsnips, and a few late cabbages.

  Egan refuses to go into Caelin’s rooms. He stands at what remains of the steps and shakes his head, remembering the special death Cadwallon designed for the lady and her children. “Lady Elfhild. The children …” he says. “I cannot. I cannot.”