Brothers of the Wild North Sea

by Harper Fox

  The lead was melting in the panes. When Cai and the Viking hit the eastern window, the rough glass cracked. This was Theo’s window, from which he’d kept a benign father’s watch over his realm. The only large one in the place—it burst outward, hurling Cai into the dark.

  There had been nights—just a couple, when joining his father’s revelries had been easier than hiding from them—which might explain such an awakening. There was a body under his. It was large and smelly, clad in animal hides. There seemed to be a lot of blood and hair. The halfwit Eyulf was sitting nearby, rocking himself and keening.

  The body he was lying on was cold. Cai lurched up. Eyulf gave a squawk and hurled himself into his arms, his cries turning to crowing laughter.

  “Eyulf, the kitchens,” Cai muttered—all the poor lad understood, and usually enough to send him on his way. But Eyulf clung. Struggling to sit upright, Cai looked around him. He was on the rocks below the scriptorium. Around him, mist and smoke were drifting in pallid dawn light. He couldn’t see more than a few yards into the miasma. There were smells in it he recognised and didn’t want to, smells that caught in his throat and made him gag with horror. Burned sheepskin—no, burned vellum, subtly different. Behind it, under it and running through it like a shriek was charred flesh. He tried to push Eyulf off him. One of his arms was reluctant to work, though, and every bone in his body hurt.

  He’d fallen from the scriptorium window, five men’s heights above. Pieces of the thick, cloudy glass were shattered in a wide fan around him. He’d survived because he’d landed on the huge, fur-clad body of his assailant.

  Voices echoed in the mist—a rattle of angry Greek, and then a great ploughman’s shout. “Demetrios? Demetrios! I can hear Eyulf. This way.”

  Cai waited. Eyulf had him pinned, and anyway he couldn’t summon up the will to move. If he moved, memory would come. For now he was only a part of the rocks, barely more alive than the crushed flesh and bone that had broken his fall. His lungs filled with pale grey fog. He tried to let it into his mind. He tried not to breathe.

  “Caius? Oh, God be praised—Demetrios, Caius is here!”

  “He knew it. He said so. Cai, come quickly—he’s hanging on for you.”

  Two shapes coalesced from the mist. One of them prised Eyulf off him and set the poor boy on his feet. The other rolled the dead Viking away far enough for Cai to realise one of his legs had been trapped beneath the corpse. Sensations weren’t registering properly with him. As a physician and as Broc’s son, he’d observed this happen to men who’d been frightened past their nature’s boundaries. For a while they were numb, distant, slow to respond. Cai had considered it a merciful thing, the soul’s emergency poultice. He didn’t try to fight it in himself.

  “Cai! Caius!”

  That was Benedict. He was waving a hand in Cai’s face. Cai nodded to show that he’d heard. He was very fond of Ben, and even of Demetrios, who had been some kind of prince in the land of Theo’s banishment and drove the brethren near demented with his lordly airs. Cai was glad they’d both survived the night. Then a thought pierced to the heart of his detachment, and he sucked in one raw breath. “Benedict! Oslaf?”

  “Alive.” Ben gripped his hand, and they exchanged a glance. “He’s hurt, though. He needs you. We all do.”

  “Ben, who’s holding on for me? Leof?”

  Ben closed his eyes. “No. Theodosius. He wants to speak to you.”

  Cai allowed himself to be hoisted onto his feet. He could walk, he discovered, once blood had been restored to his crushed limb, and he dispensed with Ben’s support. He didn’t look to left or right, clambering up the steep path. The cries he was hearing from the burning ruins each had their claim on him, but he kept moving, his eyes fixed on the ground.

  No one had tried to carry Theo out of the scriptorium. Cai understood why at a glance—the Viking’s sword was still buried deep in his chest. The angle was awkward, the haft jammed up against the charred remains of a desk. Brother Wilf the goatherd was kneeling behind him, propping his head and shoulders.

  “My friend,” Theo said calmly, as soon as he set eyes on Caius. “Come and kneel by me.”

  Cai obeyed. He had to—his legs had folded under him. “Let me send to the infirmary. I can get you something for the pain.”

  “There’s no need. This won’t take long, and I want to be clear.” The abbot’s voice was steady, but Cai could hear on every in breath the telltale hiss of a wounded lung. “You mustn’t worry, dear Caius…about the book. It’s only a copy.”

  Cai nodded. There were a thousand things he could think of to worry about, and not one of them was a book, not even the precious vellum pages drifting in ashy rags around the room, from which Theo had taught him so much. Had been going to teach him the distance to the moon. “All right.” Gingerly he probed the ragged edge of the hole in Theo’s cassock, in the pale flesh underneath, but there was no chance. “I won’t worry. Don’t you worry either.”

  “You have to find Addy. Addy will give you the treasure—the secret of Fara.”

  The secret of Fara. In jagged echoes Cai recalled the abbot shouting those words at an enraged Viking face. “Yes, my lord abbot. I will.”

  “Don’t…humour me, you knuckleheaded son of a Roman hill-farmer. Find it. The vikingr will raid again and again until you do. Only the treasure can stop them—stop the dark from coming down. Addy has it.”

  “Who’s Addy? Can you tell me?”

  “Remember, Cai—the secret isn’t in the book. It’s in the binding. In the binding.”

  Theo couldn’t speak anymore. A lonely panic seized Cai. How long would this death take? The abbot’s lips were moving in silence, bloodstained now, repeating the words that meant nothing to Cai, no matter how hard he tried to focus. In the binding…

  “Please,” Cai whispered. “Rest now, my lord.” How long?

  A kind of bundle of rags thumped down at his side. Cai jumped, then with a shock recognised Danan. His loneliness eased just a fraction. “What are you doing here? How did you know…?”

  “I know what I need to. I have come to help. Why are you letting this good soul die in this way?”

  “I can’t save him. You can see that.”

  “Yesterday you bought from me the means to set free what you couldn’t mend.”

  “Yes, but…” Cai shivered. Unorthodox as he was, the abbot of Fara had trusted in a power and mercy outside himself. “Isn’t it in God’s hands?”

  Danan took out of her sleeve a small vial, its contents gleaming softly in the grey light. She uncapped it and took hold of Cai’s wrist. She turned his hand palm up and gazed at it intently for a moment. “Yes,” she said, gripping it hard. “Yes. In God’s hands.”

  Unsteadily Cai pressed the vial to Theo’s lips. The abbot was wheezing now, making faint sounds of incomprehensible pain. The dose ran passively into his throat, but after a moment he swallowed, and his gaze sought Cai’s, lucid and full of forgiveness. Barely ten heartbeats later, his anguished breathing ceased.

  “Caius?”

  Cai looked up. What did Ben want of him now? Danan was gone. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been kneeling by the dead man’s side. “Yes?” he said hoarsely.

  “The others need you.”

  “The others? What can I do?”

  “You’re our doctor. Help them.”

  “I’m not a doctor. I’m a…knuckleheaded son of a hill-farmer.” Something about this struck Cai as appallingly funny, and he forced back sobs of laughter. “No one ever trained me. I don’t know what to do.”

  Benedict put down a hand to him. “Well, you’re all we’ve got. I’ll help you.”

  “Ben, you’re a ploughman.”

  “More of a man than you, it seems.”

  That stung. No one save Broccus had ever accused Cai of any failing there. He got up and almost fell over the blanketed shape on the ground at his feet. “Leof,” he said, not as a question.

  “Yes. Cai, I am so very—”

>   “How many are dead?” It came out low and fast, with an odd note of command in it. Ben’s response was stranger still—he let go of Cai’s hand and stepped back, drawing himself up straight.

  “Five of us now. Brother Petros, trying to defend Theo. Andreou, trying to avenge him. Aethelstan, when he tried to stop the vikingr from getting to the forge. And…”

  “Yes.” Cai cut him off with a motion of the hand. Poor Brother Blacksmith, who’d made all the hinges and hasps for the medicine cabinets… He shook himself. “Why weren’t there more?”

  “I don’t understand that myself. They seemed to be hunting something, and when they didn’t find it, they left.”

  “Not without torching us. Is my infirmary still there?”

  “Yes. The dormitory wing is down, and the church, but—”

  “Get the injured there. Who is worst?”

  “Brother Gareth—”

  Gareth, with his warts and imaginary plague. “Damn Brother Gareth.”

  “Gareth has an axe-cut like a slice of pie out of his shoulder, but he says it’s a mere scratch and you should tend the others first. Brother John is probably dying. Cedric and Wulfhere too. The rest are walking wounded.”

  “Very well. Bring them to me in order of need. Get water boiling—lots of it—and send to the village to see what supplies they have there. Did the Vikings raid inland?”

  “No.” Benedict made a sound in his throat, as if he’d swallowed a sir. “The village is safe.”

  “Good. And what…?” Cai hesitated, but only for a moment. “What have you done with the bodies?”

  “The crypt is still standing. We took them there.”

  “Why not Leof?”

  “We were just about to move him when we found out you were alive. We thought you might want to…”

  “No. Take him down with the rest, straight away.”

  “If they come again, they will destroy us.”

  Cai paused in swabbing down his surgical table. He had changed his awkward cassock hours ago for his travelling clothes, and fastened a homespun apron around his neck and waist. He was up to his rolled-back shirtsleeves in blood. “Perhaps I missed something,” he said to Benedict, who was renewing a rope strap at the corner of the table, the one Brother Cedric had torn through in his agony. “I’d have staked my life that we were already destroyed.”

  “If they come again, they won’t leave one stone standing on another in this place. Nor one heart beating in its bone cage.”

  “That’s almost poetic, Brother Ploughman.” A trickle of shame made it through Cai’s weariness. His friend had been so much more than a farmer on this long, grim afternoon, which was at last melting down into dusk. Yes—last time the light was angled so, I was a mindless boy with no greater care than my appetite for food and the joys of the flesh. Oh Leof. Leof… Cedric and John were still alive, thanks to Ben’s steady grip on them, the stolid application of brute force while Cai had plied his blade and sheep-gut sutures. “I’m sorry. You’ve done all you can for now. Go and eat.”

  “If you will too.”

  “No. The next few hours will be crucial. I have to watch out for infections, delirium.” Was it only yesterday he’d looked around his clean infirmary and congratulated himself on its unoccupied beds? A truly good physician, Danan had told him, would put himself out of a job. As things stood, Cai couldn’t envisage ever being able to stem the tide of blood and pain pouring out of his orderly rooms. His patients were quiet now, sleeping or making their silent last dialogues with death, but the walls—and Cai’s skull—still resounded with their screams. “I’ll be all right. Go on.”

  The door creaked open. Cai suppressed a raw-nerved jump, but it was only Oslaf, his latest consignment of hot water from the kitchens in a bucket-yoke across his shoulders. He watched while the young man set his burden down, then collected up the soiled rags for the fourteenth or fifteenth time that day. Cai had better things to do, but he couldn’t seem to tear his gaze away. He saw that Oslaf made no move without first glancing over at Ben, as if checking that he was still there. And Ben returned each look with an equal warm hunger. Cai was sure they were quite unaware of their exchange. Once Oslaf had finished his tasks, he came to stand in front of Cai. “Is there anything else I can do for you? I’ll bring more water once it’s boiled.”

  “No. Wait—ask Wilfrid to come up here, and Demetrios too if he’s strong enough. I need them to carry Brother Wulfhere to the crypt.”

  “Wulfhere?” Oslaf paled. “Oh, Caius. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t have time to discuss it. We must see to the burials tomorrow. Just go.”

  Once Oslaf was gone, Benedict turned away and carried on wiping the benches. Cai couldn’t seem to move. A bitter black fury was filling him. His hands were trembling, sweat breaking out down his spine. He wanted to take up his cutting knife and drive it into Ben’s innocent back. “Why?” he rasped. “Why Leof, not Oslaf?”

  Benedict turned to face him. His expression betrayed no anger, but he sat down on the low windowsill as if suddenly worn out. “I grieve for you, Brother.”

  “Grieve for me? You have no idea. Why is your boy—yours—running around, warm and alive, while Leof, who was worth—?”

  “I grieve for you. But mind what you say.”

  Caius shut up. He pressed his fingers to his lips—to the mouth that had started to spew out such horrors. “Ben,” he whispered. “Forgive me!”

  Benedict stretched out his hand. Cai stumbled across the room to him and crashed to his knees at his feet. He buried his face in the blood-soaked dark of Ben’s apron. “Leof! Leof!”

  When he had wept until his lungs were raw and the screams in his head had dulled to exhausted silence, he sat up. Tears were rolling down Ben’s face too, tracking clean lines through the dirt. Ben stroked his hair one last time. “Where did they come from, Cai? What did they want?”

  “God knows. You’re right—the next time will finish us.”

  “What can we do?”

  Cai dragged a hand across his eyes. Already faint moans from the ward were drawing him back to his duty. “I don’t know. But when I can be spared from here, I will go and see my father.”

  Two days later, Cai was on his knees again. In part it was simply exhaustion. Both Fara’s ponies had been needed in the fields. He’d made the journey to the hillfort on foot in a bare few hours, and his soles were blistered and sore. In part it was an abandonment of pride. He had made his request, and his father had thumped down in the chair he liked to think of as his throne, burst into laughter and told him to kneel like the Christian he was, if he really desired such a thing.

  Cai did desire it. He was no longer sure that he was a Christian, and that made submission easier. He lowered his head and awaited Broc’s verdict.

  He closed his eyes, and that was a mistake. He hadn’t slept since the raid, and so hadn’t dreamed, but he was beginning to see visions. He was back in the churchyard to the east of the burnt-out church, looking at five shallow graves. Only a thin layer of soil clothed Fara, and although every man who could lift a shovel had taken his turn, the business of digging had been miserable, long drawn out in the rain. Theo at least was at rest in the cool silence of the crypt. The stonemason would mark his tomb. For the others, only a plain wooden cross stood at the head of each pile of earth. Identity was unimportant—each of these men, coming to monastic life, had cast off all selfhood, subsumed who he was in the greater brotherhood of Christ. That was the theory, anyway. It didn’t quite work out in life. Wulfhere had sung like an angel. Andreou had been a fat gossip who had loved Theo more than God. Aethelstan’s booming laugh had carried out over the noise of his forge, and Petros had made wooden bowls of such exquisite finish that matrons scrapped over them like cats in the village market. And Leof…

  In death, the theory worked well. Only Cai and his brethren knew which grave was which, and with them would vanish the knowledge that Leof lay closest to the wall, sheltered by hawthorns, cradled
in the sacred ground he had loved.

  “Caius!”

  Cai jerked his head up. The churchyard dissolved to a firelit hut. All around him, sights and sounds familiar to him from earliest childhood took up their places once again—babies crying, one of Broc’s latest wives nursing a newborn at her breast. Shepherds and traders wandered in and out. Broc’s great wolfhounds growled at the sheep being driven past the open door. The chieftain’s hut was the daily centre of all the hillfort’s dealings, and Broc wasn’t the man to call a halt to any of that just because his son had turned up, and so half the settlement had seen the proud monk from Fara drop to his knees on command. “Yes, Father?”

  “What is there in it for me?”

  Cai took him in. There am I, twenty years into the future, he thought. Strong as an ox, jet-black hair only now being streaked by a line or two of grey. Indestructible. “I don’t understand.”

  “If I grant these things to you—weapons, horses, men—what will I get in return?”

  “You know I have nothing.”

  “That was by your choice. Before you left me here, you had a kingdom to inherit.”

  A kingdom? Twelve miserable fields and a hilltop? Just two days before, Cai would have said it. He’d have laughed at the old man’s arrogance, certain he had found a better world. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting to laugh again, not if he too survived to Broc’s late years, his own sturdy frame holding him fast in a life he no longer desired. “Tell me what you want of me. I must have the weapons. I’ll do whatever you ask.”

  “Come back and be my son again.”

  “You have dozens of sons.” Cai glanced around the thriving, bustling roundhouse, from whose every shadow peered a face more or less like his own. “Hundreds by now, probably.”

  “You were my firstborn.”

  Cai swallowed hard. What had Danan said—that Broccus grieved for him? He hadn’t believed it. All his life he’d been treated like Broc’s horse or his dog. A good one, granted—an asset to be shown off on market days and feasts—but nothing more than that. Coldly he said, “May I get up now?”