The Humming of Numbers

by Joni Sensel

  Hearing his crackling footsteps, Lana ducked from behind the hawthorn to greet him. She crowed at the sight of her wood in his hand.

  “You brought it!” Not even taking it from him, she jumped to plant kisses all over his cheeks.

  “You must promise not to sell it, or work mischief with it, or even discuss it with anyone,” Aidan warned, trying to cover all possibilities.

  “I promise you,” she said soberly. “Can you feel it?”

  He nodded, giving over her treasures. “I can’t understand it, but I see why you think it is special. It hums of eleven as well, and other numbers, all primes.” Outside the abbey, Aidan had inspected the age-polished wood, listening as closely as he could. He heard seventeen and thirteen and the same bright and trickish eleven that he thought of as belonging to Lana. Perhaps she would show him where she had found it. He doubted that fragments of Christ’s crucifix had traveled so far from the Holy Land, or that their bearer would have lost them if they had. He would not be surprised, though, to learn that these lumps of wood had some other connection to power—fragments from the ship of Saint Brendan the Voyager or the staff of Saint Patrick or the Briton King Arthur’s great table. He expected Lana would puzzle it out eventually.

  As she danced in joy, the sticks clasped in her hands, he told her his own happy tidings. She cheered—then pouted.

  “That means I will see you only at night,” she said.

  “And Sunday,” he reminded her. “The scribes do not work then. Winter nights are coming, though, Lana. They may be cold, but they’re long.” With effort, he quashed the grin that wanted to arise at the prospect of long nights with her.

  She pursed her lips and tapped them with a piece of her wood. “Aidan, I am so happy for you, and I will accept nights without days. Please don’t misunderstand me. But if I do have to renounce my inheritance, and you create books all day long, how will I eat? And suppose we have children? Can you bring food home for us?”

  Aidan stiffened, dismayed by how poorly he had thought this all through. He’d been so amazed by Brother Nathan’s offer, and so weary, that his mind had not been working clearly.

  Then the answer arrived, belatedly. It brought relief wrapped in heartache.

  “We’ll still live in my father’s cottage,” he told her. He thought of the work his mother had done there, and it hurt. “You can help Regan and Gabe’s wife prepare food and tend the animals. My brothers would never let them starve, nor will you.”

  A glimmer of hope shone on her face before being trampled by her dogged practicality. “Sooner or later they’ll have wives of their own, though,” Lana said. “Wives who will want to take over the house and the fruits of their husbands’ labors.”

  As difficult as it was for him to imagine Liam with a new wife, Aidan knew she was right. He nodded, untroubled. His mind had already traced a few other options.

  “The animals are the crux, though, Lana, not the house. A sod house can go up in a few days. You and Sarah can till my land share together, or we can trade some of the oxen for more milk cows and ewes so you can make butter and cheese. Decent cows will yield enough extra to trade. I’ll bring home what I can and do chores in the dark if need be. Either way, I dare say you’ll eat better than you have until now.”

  The strain on her face broke. “That wouldn’t be hard,” she said. “And I am happy to work for my keep like anyone else. But I don’t know much about cows.”

  “You’ll learn. You’ve learned your mother’s lessons, obviously.”

  She set her wood carefully down at the base of a tree. Her deliberate manner made Aidan think she was angry or changing her mind about becoming his wife. He watched, apprehensive, as she walked back to face him and took his uninjured hand in both of her own.

  “I may be able to trade as a midwife as well, once my mother is gone,” Lana said softly. “If you will not prohibit it.”

  Aidan drew a deep, careful breath. “I will make sure you don’t need to,” he said. “I can’t have the monks know my wife is a witch.” They would hear rumors regardless, of course. Brother Nathan’s hard staring that morning implied that they already had. There were limits, however, to what men could ignore.

  “Monks don’t need midwives, so they won’t find out.” Her sly grin lit her face. Aidan fought a swell of terror, wondering what trouble he was sowing for himself.

  His fear subsided in the wash of her singing eleven. It surged when she smiled, and Aidan’s doubts were drowned out by the strength and hope and mystery of that hum.

  Lana squeezed his fingers and asked, “Do you have to return to the abbey right away?”

  When he told her he was free until the morrow, she drew him by the hand.

  “Come sit here with me on the moss, then.”

  She inspected his burned hand and added a few more birch leaves that she chewed and moistened with her spittle. Aidan felt like a kitten receiving a bath from its mother. He thought of his own mother, alive yesterday and now dead, and he swallowed hard against the sting in his throat before it could rise to prick childish tears.

  When Lana was done, she did not let go of his hand.

  “I wanted to tell you something,” she said. Her gaze remained on her handiwork but a smile played on her lips.

  Aidan tried to keep breathing. So many of the things she said made him nervous. He wondered if that was why his heart often quivered in her presence.

  When she raised her eyes to his and their blue weight fell on him, his stomach flopped. As tired and heartsick as he was, that look made him forget it.

  “Do you remember the first time I saw you?” she asked.

  “When I gave you the rose?”

  “No, before that. When I first arrived at the abbey.”

  “When you were dragged in, you mean,” Aidan teased. He recalled more than her unwilling entry, however. When her eyes had first fallen on him, she had looked startled and then inexplicably annoyed.

  “Hush,” she admonished. “Never mind that. I recognized you. I lied later on when I said that I hadn’t.”

  “I could tell,” he told her. “But why?”

  “I didn’t recognize you from the village. I once scryed your face.”

  Aidan rolled his shoulders to cover a shiver. He did not like the idea that his image had appeared in any witching water.

  “Don’t you want to know why you appeared in my scry-bowl?” she prodded.

  “I’m afraid to.”

  She giggled and reached to tweak his chin, making him feel like a small boy even as his skin wished her hand would linger and touch more. He decided again that claiming her as his own would be worth the discomfort.

  She said, “I was scrying the face of the man I would marry. I didn’t know whose face it was, because you spent so much time with the monks, I suppose. But when I discovered you there at the abbey, in a robe, I thought my scrying must have been false.” Her mouth curved in a self-satisfied grin. “I’m rather pleased it was true.”

  Conflicted, Aidan inhaled the thick scent of the moss beneath them. Its lively, thirty-ish hum reassured him. He told himself that if God’s divine plan aligned him with a witch, then better a skilled one than a clumsy one.

  “What else haven’t you told me?” he wondered.

  Her saucy gaze fell away. The hand holding his tightened, and he could feel that she did it to conceal a tremor. Glad he could unsettle her in return, he pressed, “Be fair to me, Lana. If we’re to be bound together, it is my right to know.”

  “When you touched me last night,” she said softly, “and I stopped you, I was sorry I had.”

  Her words and the memory shot a hot spike low into his belly. This was not the sort of confession he had expected. Uncertain what reply she would want and afraid of giving a wrong one, he stayed silent. He only reached a finger to trace the red yarn of her rowan charm where it curled around the side of her neck. His fingertip slipped insolently under the yarn. Aidan wished it were the collar of her shift.

 
She murmured, “I was just scared, Aidan.”

  Her eyes contained the same anxiety now. He could see something else plain, though, and perhaps more important, that she did not say: Last night, she had needed to know she could stop him.

  With effort he pulled his hand from her neck and clenched it in his lap. “As much as you scare me,” he said, “I don’t want to scare you. Not like that. And I don’t want to make you think of … of anyone who has hurt you.”

  She didn’t respond, only gazed at him, but he lost track of her eyes for her lips. They pressed together, then parted, then seemed to beg him to kiss them.

  He gave them what they, and he, wanted. Lana did not react as if she were scared.

  Their kiss blurred into a harmony of warm breath and soft gasps and heartbeats and not enough skin. Then a stone poked Aidan’s ribs, and probably Lana’s, as he lay back with her on the moss. The nip of pain sliced through the thundering None that rolled through his head when they touched. It returned him briefly to himself. He realized what he was about to do if she did not stop him … again.

  He shook his head to clear it and pushed himself back upright.

  She remained prone on the moss, only shifting to avoid the sharp edge of the rock. She watched him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You take all of my will from me except for one thing. But we can stand at the door of the church soon enough. I can wait if I know it will not be forever.”

  Although his voice sounded firm in his ears, he could not stop the question sent by his eyes. Lana gazed back for long seconds before her lashes veiled the blue gleam in quick, flustered sweeps.

  “If we will truly be wed, Aidan, and wed truly …” Her cheeks, already rosy, blazed red. “I would rather it be here beneath the trees.” With trembling fingers, she drew his right hand from its arrest near her hip to the curve of one breast, first over the shift clinging there and then sliding between the hidden chemise and her skin. Her lips barely breathed the rest of her answer: “You needn’t wait.”

  Her betrothed did not hear it. He fell into the sensations under his hand and back down against her to bury his face at her throat.

  Aidan did not draw back or ask permission again. He could tell by her rising to him that he did not need to. He never completely forgot the pain that throbbed in his hand, nor the one that weighted his chest and muttered of violent deaths, but Lana helped him see beyond those to much better things. The wounds they both carried slipped off and lay beside them instead of crushing on top. Aidan drew Lana’s eleven over his skin like a cloak, and inside it, found love. For a time, the humming of all other numbers dimmed behind the brilliant None they created in each other’s arms.

  The oaks, hazels, and yews of the grove heard that None, and they whispered.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although Aidan’s story and the abbey of Saint Nevin are fictional, their backdrop is authentic. The witchcraft is based on ancient herbal lore, and life in the monastic society is compatible with the wide range of Irish practices at the time. Laymen first became involved in illumination around this era, too. Similarly, Aidan could not think of zero when he pondered the humming of None because the concept of a numeral zero would not appear in western cultures for several hundred years, and it wouldn’t catch on until much later than that.

  I have taken just a few conscious liberties with word choice or depictions, usually to remain within familiar paradigms and thus create more accurate pictures in readers’ minds. Some cultural aspects of pre-Norman Christian Ireland, such as the frequent fostering of children, differed surprisingly from other western societies of the same era. To avoid tedious explanations, I did not address such customs when they seemed tangential to this story.

  For readers troubled by such liberties or any unintentional errors, my apologies—with the caveat that fiction creates its own truth.

  Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Copyright © 2008 by Joni Sensel

  All rights reserved.

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  Publishers since 1866

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, New York 10010

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  Book designed by Laurent Linn

  eISBN 9781429940672

  First eBook Edition : June 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sensel, Joni.

  The humming of numbers / Joni Sensel.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Aiden, a novice about to take monastic vows in tenth-century

  Ireland, meets Lana, a girl who understands his ability to hear the sounds of

  numbers humming from all living things, and just as he is beginning to

  question his religious calling, the two of them are thrown together in a mission

  to save their village from invading Vikings.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8327-9 / ISBN-10: 0-8050-8327-8

  [1. Monastic and religious life—Fiction. 2. Witches—Fiction. 3. Vikings—

  Fiction. 4. Ireland—History—To 1172—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S4784Hu 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007027569

  First Edition—2008