by Joni Sensel
“Move more slowly. Come on.” She held the branch for him, backing in her crouch as he entered. The thorns caught his robe on all sides, but with her help he eased past.
Once inside, Aidan straightened cautiously. The nook extended almost his height at its peak. Nearly as wide, it ranged deep enough so that a cow could have sheltered there comfortably. Daylight filtered in through the hawthorn. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the murk, but when they did, he saw that Lana had been here before. Candle stubs rested in a small wooden bowl stashed among the twisted roots. The dirt and crumbling rot under their feet had been spread with fern fronds, and a long-wilted daisy chain hung from a notch in the wood. Aidan only hoped that none of the humped roots supporting the tree’s weight would choose today to settle deeper in rot.
“If we had a flint and char I could light the candles,” Lana said. “But we don’t.” She perched on a knob of root-wood curving out as if for that purpose. “I’ve never been here at night, but I won’t be too scared with you here. I know we’re safe from people, at least.”
“This is a good hiding spot,” Aidan agreed. He took a deep breath, trying to ignore a sudden reluctance to be separated from her. “But I’m going to leave you here safe by yourself for a while. It will be dark soon, and I’ve got to find out what has happened at the abbey and see if it is wise for us to return yet.”
“No! Don’t leave me!”
Her plea dug at him. He gritted his teeth, reminding himself she would be far safer here than with him.
“If the abbey’s secure,” he promised, “I’ll come back to get you.”
“What if you meet them again in the woods? And what if you can’t find your way back in the dark? And what if the abbey’s not safe? They might see you coming!”
Aidan dropped to his haunches before her. “Lana, I can’t just hide here with you, not knowing. I’ll—”
“Why not?”
“Because.” He floundered for a better answer, and added, “If the Norsemen are still here, the survivors and any of your father’s men who escaped will be mustering to fight back. They’ll need anyone they can get. Like me.”
“You’re a monk! What do you know about fighting?”
“As much as any other commoner,” Aidan said, pushing back a hot flush of defensiveness. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I can.”
“But—” She stopped. Aidan could read the question in her eyes anyway.
“If I don’t come back,” he replied gently, “you’d better wait another full day before you come look, or at least until you’re so hungry you don’t have any choice. They won’t stay forever.”
“Aidan!” The fright in her voice tore at his skin.
“You’ll be all right,” he told her, trying to convince both of them. Though his head assured him this plan was best, his heart argued. Feeling his determination waver, Aidan turned to duck out before it failed completely. He hoped the hawthorn gate would let him go more easily than it had admitted him.
“Wait. Take this.”
When he looked back over his shoulder, she drew her red yarn necklace over her head. The crossed twigs tied at its center were wound with a separate length of red wool.
“Your cross? Why?”
She rose to drape it over his head and tuck the bits of wood down the neck of his robe. Her touch, too familiar to be polite, made Aidan’s skin tingle. He jigged nervously.
“It is not just a cross,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “‘Tis my charm from the flying rowan I showed you outside. ’Twill help protect you. Are the oak leaves still here or did they fall out?” She patted his chest.
Aidan opened his mouth to protest her motherly fussing, raising a hand to push hers away. Before he could, she found the leaves snagged in the wool of his robe. Her palm flattened there and she shifted closer, raising her eyes. Suddenly her touch didn’t feel so motherly. The hand Aidan had lifted to remove hers only curled around her fingers instead. He could feel his heart beating hard beneath both of their hands.
“Lana,” Aidan murmured, unsure what words would follow.
“Be careful,” she said. She tipped her face down toward their hands, but he saw her cheeks bloom. “Come back.” Though she didn’t look up, an impish grin appeared through her blush. “You still have to teach me to read.”
That grin was worse than her blush. Never in his life had Aidan wanted to kiss someone so badly. He hadn’t had much practice, and the scant kissing he had tried in the past had brought him more guilty thrill than pleasure. It had felt a bit sloppy and dangerous, as if drool might intrude at any instant. Kissing Lana would be different. He could tell by the hot tingling between them. It felt like the breathless moment between lightning and thunder.
Aidan closed his eyes, protecting himself from the pull of her lips. His face cramped in struggle. When he opened his eyes, he had remembered that he was a monk. Not a good monk; a good monk would have let go of her hand and moved away. Aidan let go of her hand to graze her jaw with his fingertips in wordless longing.
That proved to be a mistake. Lana’s face tipped upward under his hand and as her eyes struck his, Aidan’s mind stopped working at all. Without his meaning it, his hand curled to better fit her jaw, drawing her face closer. His lips met hers. She gasped delicately, and he felt the tiny intake of breath tug at him, moving his body to lean into hers.
Lana kissed him in return, and Aidan would have forgotten the abbey and the Vikings and everything else if she hadn’t drawn away after a long, fiery moment. Her palm, still flat on his chest, pushed back with increasing pressure until finally he felt it. He caught himself. When he again opened his eyes, unaware of when they had closed, she was staring at him, her own eyes drawn wide. Now her hand leapt away from his heart as if burned.
Aidan drew a ragged breath. His chest ached and pounded as though he’d been running.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” he mumbled, more to himself than to her.
“I don’t mind that you did.” Her cheeks blazing, Lana’s gaze fell away. Her fluttering fingers twisted in a lock of her hair. Somewhere she’d lost the length of yarn that had bound it.
“I shouldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
Aidan ran both hands through his hair and turned to go. Her question was too vast for him to even scratch at the answer.
“I’ll be back,” he said, thickly.
“After that, you had better,” she said, her lips crushing a smile. The smile blinked out. “I might not have anyone else left.”
Her plaintive words snagged Aidan’s heart. Images of burnt-out cottages and dead bodies filled his head and he turned back to her once more, in part to banish those thoughts.
“Here,” he said, dropping to one knee. He shoved aside the fern fronds and drew four figures in the soft duff below: .
“Ah, bay, kay, dhay,” he said as he drew. “The first four Latin letters.” He ran through their main sounds and added, “Learn them while I’m gone.” Without waiting for any reaction or letting himself be snared again by her eyes, he shoved through the hawthorn and escaped, oblivious to the scratches he took from the thorns.
XIII
Aidan revisited that kiss the entire way back through the woods. What stunned him most was not how hopelessly unchaste it had been or the way he could still feel her lips against his. The shocking thing was the number that had hummed behind that kiss. He could close his eyes and retrieve it, a deep bass emptiness—not nothing, but None. Different from the soundless nothing of sleep or the chill draft from an unoccupied grave, this Naught seared a white-hot blank against darkness, a thrumming so low he heard it in his bones. None vibrated of floods, of clearing away, of transformation and change. None was the sound of the full moon and the round sun breaking over the eastern horizon. It was the sound, Aidan imagined, that the heavens had made on the first day, before God had done anything more than move upon the face of the waters. If it wasn’t blasphemy to think such a thing, it was very nearly the hummi
ng of the Lord God Himself.
His amazement was quenched by the sudden realization that he wasn’t sure where he was. Returning back through the woods in the twilight proved harder than Aidan had guessed. Though already aloft, the lopsided moon danced too often with clouds to offer much aid. Stumbling onto a clearing in the trees, Aidan made out enough of the terrain below to reorient himself. Twice more, however, he found himself confronting a creek in the wrong place or a hill where he’d expected a hollow. Only after he gave up on his eyes to follow the stench of burning and the slope under his feet did he finally aim true.
Eventually he broke into open fields and got his bearings. Then Aidan coursed the drystone walls, moving in long Z shapes toward the monastery. It blotted the horizon like black ink splashed on a purple drape. The evening was dreadfully silent, free from the grunting of pigs and the braying of donkeys. A few orange streaks in the distance marked roofs and crops still smoldering yet. Aidan stayed hunched in the shelter of the low walls, not stopping to prod any of the lumpy shadows in the fields. They were clearly not cattle or sheep. He did not want to recognize more than that.
When he drew near the abbey’s rear gate, he hunkered under a tree for a long while, listening to nothing and seeing even less. He smelled char but could not find a billow of smoke. If anyone at all breathed inside the monastery’s ramparts, it was not apparent.
Aidan crept to the gate, which he found ajar. Peering through the gap revealed more darkness. Drawing a tense breath, he slipped inside.
He dropped immediately to a crouch, nearly invisible alongside the thick gatepost. Robed bodies, impossible to deny, were strewn in the yard.
Aidan swallowed hard against the gorge that rose in his throat. Cowls and hems fluttered, lifted by the light nighttime breeze. Their owners no longer hummed of numbers at all. Aidan could hear only faint echoes, mostly the desperation of one, bouncing in the yard’s vast, hollow silence.
He scanned the nearest building, the kitchen. No light glowed from inside. When he was sure that this much of the compound, at least, was deserted, he crept toward the Great Hall and the monks’ cells beyond. The minutes dragged with his feet. He bit his tongue to keep from calling out for one of his brethren, anyone, to answer. The only thought that kept him from fleeing was the recognition that the corpses on display were not enough to account for all of the monks. The rest could be holed up or hostages yet.
The rows of monks’ cells and the novices’ dormitory also were still. In the yard between there and the front gate, Aidan froze. He feared he recognized a slight form sprawled in the dust. After long seconds, motionless except for the thudding of his heart, Aidan goaded himself to check closer. Once he had already decided whose body it must be, he could finally move his feet.
Rory had fallen facedown. Wincing, Aidan put a hand on his shoulder to gently roll him. He whimpered at the result. His friend had been struck across the back of the neck with a heavy blade. His broken neck had been nearly severed as well, so Rory’s body flopped over while his head only lolled. Aidan’s stomach lurched. Empty, it had nothing to discharge but bitter phlegm.
Not hearing his own sobbing breath, he gently pushed Rory’s body back into place. He hoped the younger boy had not seen the blow coming, but his sprawl suggested he had been running. Aidan doubted that the foreknowledge of a short life had much eased Rory’s fear at its end. His eyes burned at that thought. He didn’t bother, in the dark, to blink away the gathering tears.
When Aidan lifted his hand from Rory’s shoulder, his palm squelched, sticky. Revolted, he leapt back to his feet. Furiously scrubbing his bloody hand across the wool of his robe, he dashed blindly toward the abbey’s main gate. He’d seen enough.
A bell rang.
Startled beyond reason, Aidan plastered himself against the nearest refuge, the High Cross that loomed near the gate. It offered no comfort but the cover of shadow. His mind flailed to connect the ringing with the fact that the monastery seemed to be peopled with nothing but corpses. The bell had tolled four times before he realized it was not random noise but the steady, sedate mark of the hours. Seven chimes altogether, calling monks to the evening’s last prayers as though nothing had happened.
Half expecting the dead to rise and answer that call, Aidan did not. He only pressed his limbs tighter to the carved cross. Both the stone and cold sweat chilled his body before the obvious truth wormed into his mind: Somebody in the abbey still lived.
His muscles suddenly mobile again, he hurried back the way he had come. He remembered something he’d considered earlier and, in the horror of corpses, forgotten: Any of his brethren who had outpaced or outwitted the raiders could be hunkered in the souterrain, an underground tunnel used most of the time for food storage. Its entrance near the kitchen garden was hidden, this time of year, by berry brambles run wild. Of course that’s where survivors would be. He should have gone there first.
Rounding a corner of the Great Hall at a run, he saw the darkness ahead flicker and thin. Perhaps a dozen hooded figures, lit lamps in hand, were emerging from the earth as if from a grave. At the sound of his racing footsteps, they froze. His heart jerking, Aidan skidded to a halt, too. He’d seen the same figures, with the same glow about them, every night since he’d become a novice. Never before, though, had he heard the fearsome drone of the number one around them. With that sound grating behind his jaw, those walking shadows too easily could be ghosts.
Aidan only caught his breath again when he recognized Brother Eamon.
“Brother Aidan. Praise be to Him,” Eamon murmured, coming out of the gloom. His face looked haggard. “How is it that God has spared you? I thought you’d been taken or slain.”
“I was outside the walls, in the woods,” Aidan explained, “on an errand for Brother Nathan. The attack—how did it happen?”
Eamon lowered his head and moved forward once more. Aidan fell in alongside him. A few more monks, apparently the first to quit the tunnel, approached from other directions. Aidan spotted Brother Nathan’s sharp profile a few dark figures ahead. It was he who had rung the handbell; it still dangled in his grip.
“They were inside the gate swinging swords without warning,” Brother Eamon told Aidan. “We were caught unawares. They gave no quarter and no chance to ransom our safety by paying a tribute. And clearly our blessed Saint Nevin did not intervene on behalf of his monks.” He shook his head, his face wrenched with sorrow. “I fear our youngest brothers suffered the most. Many were near the gate in a game of rounders and stood amazed for too long before starting to run. Every novice—every one except you—was taken captive or killed.”
“I saw Brother Rory,” Aidan murmured.
Eamon sighed. “The abbot fell also, trying to stop some of the plunder. Other brave martyrs drew attention from our tunnel. But though a few of us hid from the heathens, God’s wrath has still found us. We must have strayed from the path Christ intended.”
Aidan blinked, not understanding. The elder monk made it sound as if the attack had been somehow deserved.
“How many brothers are left?” he asked. Surely this dozen were only a part. “And what’s going on? Why did the bell toll?”
“The bell?” Brother Eamon echoed. He nodded toward the altar as they entered the chapel. “It is the Hour of Compline. We must pray.”
“Now?”
When his mentor cast him a chiding look, Aidan added, “Bodies lie everywhere. Can we not at least bring them in and lay them to rest?”
Brother Eamon’s sagging face hardened.
“The dead will not wander away, Brother Aidan,” he said. “Our duty first is to God.”
Aidan’s feet stopped while he fumbled for a response. Eamon kept walking.
“The gates, though—the rear gate was unguarded,” Aidan argued. “I came in that way. What if the raiders come back?”
The monk walking just behind him, a sour-faced stonecutter Aidan generally avoided, stepped around him and said, “Look about, novice. The heathens have s
mall reason to return. There is naught left to defile.”
Locked in place while the remaining monks flowed about him, Aidan lifted his eyes. The chapel had been brutalized. The communion chalice and the fine fabrics dressing the altar were gone, along with the bronze crucifix that had hung over it and the gold candlesticks alongside. The silver censers had been torn from their chains, the carved wooden reliquaries hacked open. The old monk who had tended them slumped nearby, also hacked open, having apparently tried to protect the bones of Saint Nevin. Those remains lay scattered ingloriously, of little value to heathens. The more worldly relics, a jeweled girdle and other effects of the saint, had vanished.
A weight hit Aidan’s heart along with a new realization—the manuscripts, too, had surely been stolen. Certainly the books that belonged on the altar and lectern were missing.
“The scriptorium?” he moaned. He darted to Brother Nathan, near the front of the procession. At Aidan’s touch on his sleeve, the monk granted the novice a kindly look out of place on his usually strict features.
“You have cheated the Angel of Death, Brother Aidan,” he said. “Would that I had sent a dozen novices after oak apples today.”
“The books, Brother Nathan—are they gone?” Even the profane books in the collection, copies of Greek verse and philosophy, counted among the monastery’s most priceless possessions. Neither those nor the holy works could be read or valued by heathens, but the pirates weren’t fools. Royals and nobles and, shamefully, other monasteries across Eire, Britannia, and Gaul would pay handsomely, no questions asked, to possess them.
“I fear it is so,” Nathan said. “I have just come from there. The bound volumes were ravaged or stolen, the loose folios and wood tablets burned. I did not dare collect any before retreating to the tunnel. In cowardice I have sinned.” He drew a hand over his long face.
Aidan squirmed in unfamiliar sympathy for a man who had previously caused him only awe. Meekly, he protested, “God could not blame you for wanting to live, could He?”