Brothers of the Wild North Sea

by Harper Fox

  “Cai, please get dressed. No man as beautiful as you should ever be allowed amongst monks.”

  Caius looked at Leof in surprise. He was sitting curled up on the turf, his skirts firmly tucked around his ankles. He was pale in the sunlight, and Cai put the cassock down again and unpacked the last of his bread and cheese. He had a little wine left too, nice Traprain mead, not as good as the stuff they brewed up themselves at Fara but restorative nonetheless. “Here,” he said, dropping down beside Leof and handing him the flagon and a chunk of bread folded up round the cheese. “I am not beautiful. I’m a Roman-Briton mongrel with no grace. Not like…” He pushed Leof’s breeze-winnowed hair off his brow. Of all the polyglot men who had gathered at Fara—old-blood villagers like himself, Theo’s Greek contingent, the Angles and Danes from the colonies further south—he was the fairest, probably nearest in kin to the strapping, great Vikings who tore up the shorelines all summer long. Not that Cai would ever have said so to gentle-spirited Leof, who abhorred their very name. “Not like you, my blue-eyed Saxon. Now eat and drink, and tell me what’s bothering you.”

  Leof wiped his mouth like a child. “I almost don’t want to. I feel so ungrateful, when I’ve been so happy with you.”

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” Cai frowned and cast his mind back over the past few weeks, his own various misdemeanours. Theo was tolerant, but… “Oh. Am I leaving?”

  “No. Nothing like that. I missed you so much while you were away, but…I thought more too. Prayed more.”

  “Am I that much of a disturbance?”

  “Not you yourself. Your friendship means everything to me. It’s just that I can hear the voice of God more clearly when you’re not here to make my flesh sing. Caius—please put your cassock back on.”

  Cai got up. What surprised him was that he wasn’t more surprised. He unfolded the garment and slipped its familiar weight over his head. In the musky dark of his own scent, a bitter anger touched him. He wasn’t quite used to Leof’s god even now, and he felt as if he’d lost to a rival. He emerged, tossing back the hood from his head, and saw Leof white and stricken, tears beginning to gleam on his face.

  “Oh, Cai. You do still love me, don’t you?”

  Cai strode over to him. He knelt beside him and hauled him into his arms. “Of course.” Yes, he had been waiting for this. Leof becoming his lover at all was an example of something Theo called irony. Leof’s gentle teachings about peace, detachment, release from the hungers of the flesh—these had drawn Cai to him in the first place. He kissed the bowed head on his shoulder, remembering his first sight of that flaxen hair across a rowdy marketplace in Alnwick. Cai had bartered with him for Fara mead, and then while the wagons were being packed up towards sundown, had walked with him up onto the hill that overlooked the town.

  Cai had had a bad day. He’d gone to seek his father and found him grunting and sweating over a slave girl young enough to be his grandchild. He’d had a bad week, trailing the old goat around the strongholds, joining in brief, bloody skirmishes when Broc took a fancy to a neighbour’s cow, plough or daughters. Leof hadn’t preached. He’d simply talked about Fara—the wide, quiet spaces, the companionship of like-minded men, the chance to learn. Cai had met him three times after that. On the third occasion he’d decided he wanted to become a monk, and had celebrated by rolling the wide-eyed, willing Leof down into the hay in an abandoned barn. And willing Leof had remained, but Cai knew he had pulled the lad out of his natural ways. “How could I not love you? Please don’t weep.”

  “Don’t you mind?”

  “Yes.” Just not as much as I’d expected to. You touch my innermost soul, but not like that—even when I’m coming with you, racked by that fierce joy, I still can hear the gulls call, the waves wash on the sand. “It’s your choice, though.”

  “I want to try to be celibate again. We did take vows of chastity, you know.”

  “Yes, but that means keeping clear of village maidens, doesn’t it?”

  Leof chuckled wistfully. “I think it means this too.”

  “Well, Theo never specified.”

  “No. He leaves us to choose for ourselves—perhaps too much.” He sat up, and Cai offered him a rag from his provisions pack to blow his nose. “Cai—will you try it too? You say you don’t hear God when he speaks to you, and maybe that’s been my fault, letting us both be distracted by… Oh. Kissing me that way is not a good start, is it?”

  Cai sat back, ashamed. He didn’t mind Leof’s choice, but his own nature was sensual, contrary, his flesh already missing what it knew it could no longer have. “I’m sorry. Come on. We should go, before Theo spots us out here with his spyglass. I didn’t tell you—I met Danan on the path not half an hour ago.”

  “Did you?” Leof put out a hand to be hoisted up, gratitude for the change of subject in his eyes. “What gossip did she have for you?”

  “Not much. She did have a prophecy, though. The Vikings are coming, she said.”

  “The Vikings always come. Not yet, though—it’s still much too cold for good raiding.”

  “That’s what I told her.” Cai put an arm around Leof’s waist. The gesture was only fraternal, and Leof seemed to perceive it that way, relaxing into his embrace and beginning to walk at his side. Perhaps I’ll make a good monk after all. Perhaps I can separate it out—flesh from spirit, and hear the voice of God as you do. “Oh, that reminds me. I have to listen.”

  “Wonders will never cease. To what?”

  “The music of the bells, Danan said. The sea bells.”

  The tide was out, the causeway crossing easy. The pony tossed its head in the salty wind that swept across the mudflats and started to pull ahead of Caius on its leading rein. Cai restrained it gently. He didn’t want his bottles and supplies to be jostled about, but he shared the little beast’s enthusiasm for home. The monastery stood on a vast outcrop of rock—the final flourish, so they said, of a great spine of it that ran right across the country to the west coast, bearing for many of its rippling miles the remains of Emperor Hadrian’s great wall. On its northern side, where windswept slopes ran down to the beach, the brethren had terraced the land and persuaded from it—with the aid of many tons of stinking kelp—crops of oats and barley. There was Brother Benedict now, the only one of them strong enough to handle the plough unaided, pacing the length of one terrace behind a patient ox. Beside him walked his inseparable companion Oslaf, chanting Saxon myths and Christian psalms to him to keep him entertained and his furrows running in a straight line. On the rocky landward side where little else grew, Demetrios was collecting scurvy grass and bellowing in Greek at Wilfrid’s goats, who also loved the succulent green leaves.

  Oslaf spotted Cai and Leof and lifted a hand in greeting. Cai grinned, waving back. Leof was lit up with pleasure too. It was a good place for a homecoming. A hard-worked, hand-to-mouth existence, but a rational one, with time for contemplation and learning. Cai was young enough, sickened enough by his father’s bestial ways, to imagine he’d found his path. If he didn’t believe as Leof did—if he couldn’t yet kneel in Fara’s church and truly accept he was bathed in the presence of God—that would come.

  A powerful voice boomed out across the salt flats. “Wilfrid!”

  Cai was close enough to see the goatherd jump as if slapped. At the top of the narrow trail that led up Fara’s western flank, a tall, spare figure had appeared—Abbot Theodosius, never far from the workday crises of his monks. His desk in the scriptorium was placed to give him a view out over the widest possible sweep of the land. “Wilfrid, do you wish a flaking rash to break across your skin?”

  “No, my lord abbot.”

  “Do you wish…? Let me see… Do you wish for loose teeth, a dry mouth, mysterious bruising and seizures?”

  “No, my lord abbot.”

  “Nor do any of us. Keep your goats under control and let Demetrios gather his weeds. Well, Caius, my physician—did I miss anything out?”

  Cai brought the pony to a halt. Other
s of his brethren were running to take charge of the beast, unsaddle him and carry Cai’s packages upslope. Theo was bounding down the steps that still divided them.

  “Bloodlessness and haemorrhaging in the late stages,” Cai called up to him, “but otherwise, well done.”

  “Ah, you see—I attend, I learn. Still, I’m glad to see you back—Brother Gareth has plague.”

  “Yes, so I’m told.”

  “How was your journey? Did you trade off all our wool?”

  “Yes, and next year’s shearing too, if we’ll weave it ourselves for the market.”

  “Good boy, good boy.” Theo leapt the last four steps in one and strode to greet them, hands extended. “Let me bless you. Leof, you too, though I did see you only an hour ago.”

  Cai hitched up his cassock hem and dropped to his knees on the turf, Leof mirroring his action at his side. Never in his life had Cai knelt to any man, or any god, until he came to Fara. Here, though, in the pure sweet air, the gesture had been stripped of shame for him. He bowed his head and waited for his abbot’s benediction.

  “Blessed be the travellers who come safely home,” Theo pronounced, resting his hands on their skulls.

  “Praise be to God,” they chorused back. They had all three switched into Church Latin, their only common tongue, Leof and Cai dropping the homely dialect of the northern shores. The transition was a reflex for Cai by now. He’d struggled at first, but a two-year immersion in the language of Bible and churchmen the world over had had its effect, and he’d discovered to his surprise that Broccus had prepared his mind for some of it, with the bawdy old chants handed down to him from his Roman forebears.

  The benediction over, Theodosius ruffled their hair, first Cai’s dark mop and then Leof’s fair one. “I should tonsure you,” he said worriedly. “I know I should. You two and all the others.”

  Cai smiled up at him, pushing to his feet. He’d gathered from his trading trips that certain aspects of monastic life were different here than in other communities. There were no astronomy lessons for the brotherhoods down south—why should there be, when God had fixed the Earth at the centre of creation, leaving nothing new to know?—and Cai had learned to raise his hood when dealing with the monks of Tyne, or risk a storm of disapprobation for his unshorn head.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, setting off with Leof and Theo up the steps. “Don’t you think there ought to be some kind of dispensation? For brethren like ourselves, I mean, who tend the fires of faith this far to the north. After all, the bulk of our bodies’ heat loss occurs through the top of the skull, I’ve observed.”

  “Does it?” Theo glanced over at him, dark eyes gleaming. The scientist in him would defeat the churchman every time, as Cai had also observed. “Have you?”

  “I have. When Brother Petros got caught out in the snowdrifts with the sheep, a rabbit skin on the top of his head did him more good than all our clothes and blankets. Even than the fire.”

  “Is it so? Well, you may have a point. Enough to let me put off the evil day, anyhow—I don’t quite understand why our bald pates are pleasing in the sight of God.”

  “Because, my lord abbot,” Leof offered shyly, “he doesn’t wish us to be covered up from him.”

  “Why, Leof, you sound as if he told you so himself. No. It’s simply a sign of our renunciation of the world and its vainglory.”

  “In that case, I should like it to be done.” Leof cast a wistful glance at Cai, as if he might like the hair he’d run his fingers through in worldly, vainglorious pleasure to be left well alone. “To me, at any rate.”

  “Then so it shall be, child—as soon as I get my shears back from Brother Petros. Caius, you’ve arrived home in good time. Did Leof tell you my first chapter is complete?”

  “No, my lord abbot.” We’ve been a little busy. Cai pushed the thought away from him. “But that’s good news. Did you decide yet on a title?”

  “Yes.” They had reached a turning in the long stone flight. Theo took up position on a flat rock and spread his arms as if to address the sunny infinity of moorlands and dunes that lay before him. “Poor copy though it is, I shall call it the Gospel of Science.”

  Leof flinched. Like all the brethren of Fara, he loved and feared Theo in equal measure. He would never contradict him, but Cai had observed how he’d sit in Theo’s lectures, head bowed, his hands clasped in his lap, as if silently begging God to overlook the blasphemy one more time. Well—good and conventional churchmen did not get appointed to world’s-edge outposts like Fara, and Theo had not been so much sent as banished there. He was a renegade, a once-powerful teacher caught in the rebellious possession of books now deemed heretical by the Roman Church. Stripped of his treasured volumes, his power and authority, he had been shipped off to the far west—where, according to the beliefs of his masters, he might well tumble right off the planet’s rim and trouble them no more.

  He had noticed Leof’s involuntary twitch. Cai tensed. A man of sublime patience, a father to his flock who would help Cai bathe their wounds with his own hands, he could still fly out in rage at wilful ignorance and superstition. “Does my choice trouble you, child?”

  “Yes,” Leof said bravely. “The gospels are the words of Christ, not…arrows and dots, and long strings of numbers fit to bewilder all God-fearing men.”

  Theo smiled. “Well, I do hope not all of them. Not forever, anyway.” He resumed his climb, making room beside him on the path for Leof to walk at his side. Cai, bringing up the rear, looked at them both in affection. “Remember, Leof. All I am doing is trying to recall and write down a fragment of the books that were lost. My gospel—we can call it something else for now—will only ever be a copy, a shadow, of that great wealth. I use mathematics and diagrams because, in their neatness, they can convey what an army of monks writing all day and night could not teach. You, the best and most godly of my brethren, need not be disturbed by it at all.”

  “Yes, my lord abbot. Thank you.”

  “And although it would distress me, I will give you dispensation from illuminating my heresies—if you wish.”

  Leof jerked his head up. Cai could have laughed aloud at his open-mouthed dismay. “Why—no, sir. Please not that.”

  “Good. Because I value them, your vines and grapes and little dancing stoats.”

  “Those are foxes, sir.”

  “Ah. Well, nonetheless. You’ll carry on?”

  “Of course. I wish I saw what my plants and my beasts have to do with your—your gospel, however.”

  Theo put an arm around his shoulders. “Science makes an error,” he said, the gentle laughter fading from his voice, “in cutting itself off from nature. In thinking of itself as separate. I feel a chill inside my heart when I imagine where such an error might lead. So, my clever painter, though your vines and foxes may not illustrate the turning of the Earth upon its axis, or the distance to the moon, I hope they will remind the men of some future day that foxes, moon and Earth are one, and all the work of one great hand. Yes—I do believe that, for all my blasphemous ways. It’s not so hard, as a doctrine—even for the likes of Brother Cai.”

  Cai, who had been dreaming, surfaced at the sound of his name. “The distance to the moon?” he echoed longingly.

  “Indeed. We do it with mathematics, and that triangle whose sides are three, four, five. I’ll show you all tonight, after our feast.”

  “Are we feasting?”

  “As far as our duties and our resources allow. A chapter’s end deserves a celebration, don’t you think? I only wish we had some of old Danan’s cure for sore heads in the morning.”

  “Ah, we do. I ran into her on the trackway coming home. I traded her some jewellery for comfrey, poppy, tonics—everything we need.”

  “Good boy, good boy.”

  “Danan told Cai that the Vikings are coming,” Leof said suddenly, as if he’d been dreaming too. “It was one of her prophecies.”

  Theo patted him. “The Vikings always come. We do
n’t need to worry yet, though. It’s still too cold and rough for raiding.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s what I told Cai.”

  Cai left them outside the scriptorium. By then the two were arguing contentedly over the relative virtues of vellum and non-calfskin parchments, and they barely noticed him go.

  Shaking his head, Cai made his way straight to the infirmary, to see that his precious supplies were being properly stored away. He glanced in satisfaction round the sunny room, one of the few in the monastery that were glazed, allowing his patients the benefits of warmth and light at once. All but one of the narrow cots were empty, assuring Cai that he was doing his job well. Sitting on the edge of the occupied bunk, he treated Gareth’s warts and tried to ease the painful hypochondria that lay behind them with kindly admonitions as to letting the imagination run rife over faith, work and good common sense. Then he discharged him, to his patient’s disappointment, and went down to the laundry.

  He was sticky and sandy from his interlude with Leof in the dunes. Taking a fresh cassock from Brother Hengist’s neatly folded supply, he found himself reluctant to put it on over his dirty skin. He glanced at the angle of the sun and decided he had time to run down to the bathing pools to wash.

  He wasn’t really qualified to lecture poor Gareth on the perils of imagination. The pools were deserted at this time of day, and the tide had come in far enough to fill their natural granite basins with salty, crystalline blue. Cai swam about among the drifting seaweeds, diving and huffing at the pleasure of the water on his limbs, then scrubbed himself clean as best he could with handfuls of soft sand. By the time he was done, his skin was tingling with wellbeing, and what he’d have liked more than anything else was for Leof to appear, ready to cast off his garments and his new restraint.