Chapter Eight

He was swimming. It might have been for minutes or for years. His sense of time had gone down with the coracle, shattered to shards.

No. Not even swimming, not anymore. His arms were numb. He was clutching a spar from the wreckage. Each wave drove him under for longer, left him less time to suck lungfuls of air in between. He was starting to like the submersions. It was quiet down there, out of the shriek of the wind, the brutal chaos above. Down there was a memory, one that branched off from reality and blossomed on its own. Down there he hit the sands again with Fen, and this time no guilt about Leof rose to stop him, because Leof knew all, understood all, forgave all, and was no more likely to condemn him than the sun or the marram grasses waving over his head. Down there Fen’s arms closed round him, and even better than the sweet rush of hunger and release was the reality of that body on his, as if all his life his flesh had yearned for this brother, this counterpart, a missing piece of himself at last returned to him.

The memory-dream was waiting. The spar became an obstacle to it, a grudging barrier, and he started to push it away.

A wall sliced down into the water barely a foot from his skull. By lightning flash and tarnished light, Cai saw it—a timber wall, curved and glistening. A voice close to his ear said, “No, you don’t,” and a hand locked into the back of his shirt.

A huge strength hauled him upwards. No more tender than the waves had been, it dragged him over the top of the wall, bruising his ribs and hips. A boat, Cai realised, when he was more in than out of it, and the strength let him go, dumping him onto its deck. He landed facedown and lay still.

A boot promptly shoved at him. “Physician!”

He kept his eyes shut. He was done for, his lungs flooded. The deck beneath him heaved, and he rolled with it, nothing more than flotsam on the tide.

“You! Caius! Dead or alive?”

He got his head up, coughing and choking, and shoved onto his arms. “Dead.”

“Get your arse up off that deck and help me anyway.”

The next flash revealed a Viking in the prow. He was soaked and resplendent, his jerkin and leggings clinging to him, cassock discarded God knew where. With one hand he was clutching the mast of Fara’s only sailboat. He was holding the other out to Cai. “Come on! Help me raise sail.”

“Sail…” Cai grabbed him and hauled himself up. “You can’t. Not in this.”

“How do you think I got out here?”

That smile could dazzle the lightning. His fingers were locked round Cai’s arm, a hold that would never grow tired. “You came after me.”

“What?”

Cai repeated it, yelling through the spray. “You came after me. In a storm.”

“Call this a storm? Torleik babies sail their coracles through worse than this.” Again, that flash of a grin. “Having said that, grab the rope. We might get the chance at one run.”

“To shore?”

“No. We’ll never make it. That island, the long, low one to the east.”

Cai shielded his eyes to look. Another wave tipped the boat through the height of its mast, but Fen rode out the lurching movement easily, holding Cai fast. By harsh copper light he made out the shape on the horizon. “Not there. That’s East Fara. There’s no safe anchorage—just rocks.”

“Maybe not for fisherman monks.” Fen tossed him the rope that would haul up the boat’s ragged sail. “I am a Viking. And we have no choice.”

He was right. Cai backed off with the rope. The boat’s next lurch knocked his feet out from under him, and the sail unfurled as he slithered aft, instantly snapping belly-tight with air. Fen ran back to join him, and together they wrenched the canvas round far enough to reap the gale without capsizing, to find and ride the angle of the wind. The boat jerked forwards twice, like Eldra impatient of her harness, then shot through a gap in the waves.

Fen roared with laughter. Cai joined in. Fear fell away from him, dirty old clothes he had no use for anymore. Fen had come out for him, out through the storm, and the upshot of it all—life or death, the future Cai had spent all his life grabbing after, striving to control—didn’t matter. He was here in Fen’s moment, tearing through the lightning, and all would be well.

All would be well. Belief sprang up in him. It was nothing like the faith he had been taught. Wild and hot, it had as much to do with the sea as his salvation from it. Depended on nothing—held no God outside himself accountable. He didn’t have to reach for it at all. It was simply here, like the seals and the birds and the storm. Like Fen. It burned and hurt, then leapt up high like fire and made him laugh still louder, hauling on the rope, his hands working so close to Fen’s that when the flicker of sheet lightning came, he couldn’t tell which pair was his own.

It sustained him even when the boat’s keel struck off the rocks that guarded East Fara. A stretch of beach he hadn’t known was there gleamed briefly beyond them, and he joined frantically with Fen’s efforts to guide them there, to fly them to it while the wind ripped the sail from the mast and the boat heeled over. All would be well… The words were ringing in his head when the boat ran aground, smashing to a halt, pitching him over her prow into the dark.

 

 

“Caius. Cai!”

Hands were shaking his shoulders. He was propped against a rock. Every bone in his body felt bruised, and it was easier to stay under. To sleep. One of the hands—and he knew them, was beginning to know their touch better than his own—delivered a smart slap to the side of his face. Fen. Cai surfaced, gasping, ready to hit him back.

He was waist-deep in water. Fen must have dragged him this far ashore, far enough out of the roaring surf to set him down. The black rocks rose all round him like a jagged, burned-out forest. Waves were crashing to oblivion on their spines, rushing between them. A huge foam-topped crest heaved up out of the dark as he watched, the tempest hungry for their lives even now. Fen hadn’t seen it. He was leaning over Cai, holding him out of the water. Cai didn’t bother to try and warn him. He got his feet beneath him—surged up, grabbed Fen and shoved him ahead of him up the beach.

Neither had much running left in him. Up ahead was a crescent of rocks whose outer edge was turned to the storm-driven tide. A wave broke over it just as Cai and Fen fell into its sheltering curve, but it would do. The wind howled a little less fiercely there. The sea still stretched out its paws, but couldn’t drag them back. Sand was piled up here, strange rippled structures marked with kelp and a million fractured shells.

Cai pulled Fen out of the storm. They dropped to their knees, huddling against the rock. This time when Fen’s mouth sought his, he turned to him with a cry of joy and relief. Fen had been right—his blood was singing already, so loud the angels must hear. His skull banged off stone, and he reached up through exploding stars to grab anything he could of the Viking’s hot muscle and bone. Fen resisted him, tearing back to arm’s length, far enough to see him. “Caius.”

“My wolf from the sea.”

“Yes.”

“You came for me.”

“Well, none of your other lily-arsed brethren would do it. They saw you, and they ran around like headless chickens, but…”

“They’re not sailors. They’re not…” Not you, Cai wanted to finish, but his throat had seized up.

“Not pirates. Not vikingr.”

Cai nodded. Like their shelter, it would have to do. Another wave broke, spray arcing high, landing with a seething crackle all around. Fen’s mouth was salty with it when it next landed on Cai’s, and he moved like the thunder, bearing Cai down onto the sand. But Cai was full of newborn faith and certainty. He rolled on top, pinning him, and Fen looked up and whispered, “There you are,” as if in recognition. As if at the end of a long, lonely wait.

Cai shuddered. He straddled Fen’s thighs and ran a hand down over his stomach, over the hard plane that rippled and arched to find his touch. Fen was erect beneath the leather thong of his leggings. He moaned when Cai freed him, sea-chilled fingers clumsy on the lace. His cock lifted stiff and full into Cai’s grasp, a vision seared into Cai’s brain by the lightning. In the green-flashing darkness that followed, Cai plunged down on him, shifting to allow him access in return. He buried his face on the side of Fen’s neck. That great, strong hand was on him now, between their bodies, undoing him.

There—flesh to flesh, Fen letting go only long enough to grab him by the backside, hauling him into place. Bucking up as if he meant to dislodge him, at the same time holding him tight enough to keep him there forever. Gasping, Cai thrust back, for the first time in his life with all his strength. Leof would have broken beneath him. Fen only shouted in pleasure and rose up to meet him again. After one more kiss and shove of his tongue beneath Fen’s ear, Cai sat up to get his back into the rhythm, laying hold of both of them. He fastened a fierce grasp on Fen’s shoulders. The heated length trapped against his belly hardened still further, summoning his own to one last delicious stretch, a storm to match the tempest around him gathering in his spine.

“Fen!” he yelled, and in the next lightning flash saw him, face wild with consummation, all the amber in his vulpine stare turned silver. Climax started, a surge too huge to sustain, and Cai let go, surrendering to the inner leap.

Fen curled up from beneath him and seized him tight into his arms. They thudded down together onto the sand, wrestling in feral joy. The wind shrieked unheard. High above them in the tormented night, the moon sailed clear out of the clouds.

 

 

Pater Noster, qui es in caelis…

Cai twitched and stirred. His face was buried deep in Fen’s shirt, and if that was Abbot Aelfric, they were both in trouble now.

Sanctificetur nomen tuum!

Aelfric didn’t belt out his Our Fathers like that, as if the words were rocks he could throw to ward off the devil. The distant voice faded, and Cai decided he’d been dreaming. He pressed tighter to Fen’s side, moaning softly when the arms around him locked him more firmly into place. The storm was over. The tide had gone. The sand was softer than his bunk at Fara, Fen’s hold on him warmer than sunlight, and he could fall back into sleep.

Something tugged at his sleeve. Still not looking, he jerked his arm away. The scrabbling touch came again, this time at his belt. Trying to pull it free. Well, Fen was welcome, if he wanted to start over. It had been years since Cai had awoken with another body next to his. Hundreds of mornings trying to quell his waking erection in the name of God. Burrowing against him, Cai shivered at the powerful lift of his own flesh. The tugging came again—insistent, more like a bird plucking at him than Fen’s frank grab—and he cracked one eye open to look.

A monster was standing over him. He sat bolt upright, tearing out of Fen’s embrace, scattering sand. The monster jerked back. It put its head on one side. It wasn’t afraid—just startled by Cai’s sudden movement. It considered for a moment, then opened its toothless mouth wide and emitted a weird cry. Four others exactly like it emerged from the pale dawn light.

Cai’s erection died. He snatched for the fisherman’s knife at his belt. Behind him Fen was waking up, scrambling onto his knees. “Cai, what the hell—”

“Fara devils! I’ve heard of them. They eat shipwrecked sailors.”

“Devils? They look human to me. Almost.”

There were eight of them now. Yes, almost human. All of them skeletally thin, dressed in a few rags of sealskin. Horribly alike in the twist of their wasted features, their narrow, hairless skulls. Two of them had harelips, stumps of rotting teeth showing in the gap.

Instinctively Cai got to his feet and pressed his back to Fen’s, and felt him doing likewise, getting ready for defence. “I can take three of them. You?”

A contemptuous snort. “These bags of bones? I’ll take what’s left and come back for your three.”

“Wonderful. What are you going to do about the dozen more that just climbed up over those rocks?”

“Pater Noster, qui es in caelis!”

The devils nearest to Cai started and cringed at the voice. It was much closer now. Cai’s vision was still blurred with sleep and salt, and he dragged his sleeve over his eyes. An old man had appeared at the crest of the nearest dune. He could have been brother to Danan. His wild white hair flew with the same vigour, and he came leaping down the sandy slope with much of that lady’s unlikely speed. His hands were raised over his head. In one of them he clasped a staff like a shepherd’s, and he gesticulated with it powerfully, gestures of banishment that came in time with his shouted prayers.

“Sanctificetur nomen tuum! Adveniat regnum tuum! Fiat voluntas tua…”

Now he was on the flat, his ragged brown robes flying to expose skinny ankles. The devils began to fall back from around Cai and Fen, whimpering sounds emerging from their twisted mouths. “Sicut in caelo et in terra!”

On earth as it is in heaven. Too much for the devils of Fara, who turned in one ungainly movement and began to run, hopping and stumbling in their haste. The old man galloped after them a little way down the beach, then came to a gasping halt, arms still upraised. He dropped out of Latin and continued, sadly, as if to himself, “Give them this day their daily bread. Just not the flesh of these sailors.”

His arms fell. He turned, leaning on his staff. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

Cai glanced at Fen, who was staring at the old man in disbelief. Perhaps they both were dreaming. Benedict had died, and perhaps Cai had gone down with the coracle. This was a strange afterworld, with snaggle-toothed cannibal denizens and fleshly joys beyond imagination in the sea foam, but he would take it over Aelfric’s hellfire.

“No,” he called, steadying himself against Fen. “What are they? Why are they afraid of you?”

“They don’t seem to like the sound of Latin prayer. I use it to chase them off.” He shrugged despondently. “I might as well give the poor devils a blessing while I’m at it.”

“They are devils, then?”

The old man stumped towards them up the beach. “Not in the sense you mean. They’re as human as you are—the first people of these islands. Heaven knows how they came to be cut off here, but they only breed among themselves, and it damages them.”

“Would they have eaten us?”

Another shrug. “They eat what they can. Speaking of which, you boys will want your breakfast. I wondered why he dropped me such a big one this morning. God provides.”

Cai shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“The eagle. Such a big fish,” the old man told him easily, as if he ought to have known. “He brings me one each day, clutched in his great claws. This morning, a salmon the size of a young seal! Well, sailors have grand appetites. And being washed ashore is hungry work. Come along.”

The old man set off at a brisk pace. After an exchanged look, Cai and Fen followed him.

“Do you think he knows Latin for more than his prayers?” Fen asked quietly, dropping into stride at Cai’s side. “I understand a bit of your uncouth north-shores tongue, but clearly not enough. I thought he said an eagle dropped a fish for him.”

“He did.” Cai jogged ahead and caught the old man up. “Sir, we’re grateful for the rescue. My friend isn’t from here. Do you speak Latin, so that he can understand?”

“Of course. Ita vero.” He switched without effort, the neat Roman syllables falling more naturally from his mouth than they ever would from Cai’s. “But I’m surprised that sailors do.”

“We’re not sailors. We’re…” Cai looked back over his shoulder, daring Fen to argue. “We’re monks. From Fara monastery. We were out fishing, and we got caught in the storm.”

“From Fara?” The old man’s gaunt face lit up. “Fortunate boys! You study under Theo, then—Theodosius of Epiros, a most learned man.”

“Yes. He told us about Epiros.” Cai’s throat ached and closed. If this was the afterworld, Aelfric had been right in part, then—pain could chase and follow men there. The cry of the seagulls became desperate shouts from the scriptorium, and Leof whispered to him from out of the surf. “But…Theo is dead, sir.”

The old man stopped short in his tracks. Cai would have stumbled, but Fen was close behind him, catching him by the armpit. Cai turned to him. Only yesterday, he thought he would have to face such things—his grief, and the pain of others—alone. Always alone. No, Fen’s burnished gaze told him silently. Not now. His grip on Cai turned to a hold, and together they watched the old man, who was now stalking unhappily back and forth along a few feet of sand.

“My friend. Ah, poor Theo, my dear friend. I met him on my way back from Rome, when my elders in Hibernia sent me to study there. What was it? The cholera? He never did like this climate. He missed his dolphins and the warm sea. Was it flux? A pneumonia? Or…” He turned himself around, bare feet carving out an agitated circle in the sand. “Wait. Ah, that’s what the damned old woman wasn’t telling me. There was a Viking raid, she said, then she shut herself up, like the old clam she is. Was that how Theo died?”

Cai couldn’t keep up. His head was spinning, with exhaustion and hunger and the energies he’d spilled out with Fen during the night. “Which old woman?”

“Who? Oh. Danan, she’s calling herself this time. The herbalist, though some would say witch. A gossip, but not enough of one. Starts a story but then doesn’t tell you it all, curse her bones.”

“Danan comes out here?” Cai had never seen her anywhere near a boat. “How?”

“Only the ancient creature herself knows that. Tunnels, she says, though I’ve never found any. Probably she flies. Ah, poor Theodosius! So much learning, to be wasted and spilled out by a…”

He fell silent. The following quiet was terrible, even filled with wave-wash and the breeze. The old man stopped his pacing and drove his staff into the sand. Then he folded his hands into the sleeves of his robes. He stepped up and halted in front of Fen. “Not a sailor,” he murmured. “No, and no monk either.” He was as tall as Fen and could look him straight in the face. Fen remained still beneath his inspection, even when the old man reached to push back his fringe. “Square brow. Straight nose, high cheekbones. Red hair, but not like the western Keltoi. Red like the fox, and like blood.” He shuddered and retracted his hand. “Vikingr.”

“Ita vero,” Fen growled in return. Cai heard the danger in it and got ready to restrain him, but there was no need. The old man stepped back, lowering his head. His face was deeply marked with the lines of an old, hard-learned lesson in forbearance.

“I have been discourteous,” he said. “Whatever your origins, the wind and the waves have brought you here, and you’re my guest. Do you have a name?”

“Fenrir. This is Cai—Caius.”

“Ah. Caius, a fine old Roman name.” The old man turned his attention to Cai. “And this one is a monk, though unshorn and out of his cassock—a man of God, no matter how he feels right now. I am Aedar. Yet for many years now, the villagers along these shores have called me Addy. I’ve come to prefer it.”

“Addy…” Cai ran a hand into his unshorn hair. Another wash of vertigo went through him. “You’re Addy? My God… Theo talked to me about you just before he died. He said…”

The old man’s brow furrowed, waiting for him to go on. But the sea and the gulls, the cries from the burning scriptorium, grew too loud for Cai to think past them, and he sat down hard on the sand.

“Caius?” Addy’s hand closed on his shoulder. He glanced in appeal at Fen. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I don’t know, do I? He’s the doctor, not me.”

“Is he sick?”

“No. He loved this Theodosius, though, just as much as you do. And yesterday another friend of his died.”

“A monk of Fara?”

“Yes, by his own hand. They have another abbot there now—a damned scarecrow called Aelfric. I’m not of your faith, and they don’t let me into the church, but I’ve been watching. He’s a brute. Cai’s been trying to stop him.”

“This Aelfric—did the churchmen of Canterbury send him?”

“Aye, that was the place.”

Addy sighed deeply. “So it begins. And I am little better, with my questions and my selfish grief, when this boy is half-drowned and wholly starved. You too.”

“Such things don’t bother me, old man.”

“Hm. Tough pirate. Immune to the pangs of love too, I hope.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Just help him up and bring him with you.”

Cai tried to say he didn’t need the help. But he was so tired he could barely see, and when Fen bent down for him, he reached up gratefully, skin heating with memories of that strength closing round him in passion. “I won’t let love give you any pain,” he said indistinctly, letting Fen hoist him to his feet. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

“Quiet. You’re half-asleep. Let’s just go with this old lunatic and eat his fish, if he hasn’t dreamed it.”

 

 

The fish was real, and one of the biggest Cai had ever seen. They ate it solemnly by Addy’s fireside. For a long time silence held sway, made peaceful by the whisper of the flames in their stone pit and the sense of a vast golden day beginning all around. The dawn mists had cleared. The sea was returning pink lights to the roseate sky, as if neither had ever roared and convulsed and tried to consume them whole.

Addy’s cave lay in the shelter of a dune. No more than a deep hollow in a rocky outcrop, its sole comfort was the well-made fire pit outside it. Cai couldn’t see how the old man lived. Addy, a big chunk of salmon gleaming in his hand, returned his gaze tranquilly. If he noticed that his guests sat shoulder to shoulder while they ate, he didn’t remark on it. He passed them a flagon of cold heather ale, and when they were done, produced a bowl of fresh water and a piece of homespun linen so they could wash. “How is it with you now?”

Cai nodded, wiping fish grease off his fingers. “Better. Thank you.” He gave Fen a violent nudge, and the Viking stopped appreciatively tugging bits out from between the salmon’s bones long enough to grunt an acknowledgement too. “But how can you afford to share your food with strangers? And how do you come by the ale?”

“I have plenty.” Addy spread out his robes and settled himself more comfortably by the fire. “As for the ale, that old woman I told you about brings it to me on her devilish visits. Mead from Fara too, in which I can still taste the good work of Brother Martin, though he must be very old now. Is it so?”

“Yes. Martin’s still brewing, though Aelfric wants to shut him down.”

“The Fara mead?” Addy chuckled. “He’ll have an uprising on his hands. Tell me more about him—this new abbot of yours. What does he profess?”

Cai hardly knew how to begin. Fen was warm and solid at his side, though, and not so occupied with his fish that he couldn’t spare Cai a gentle shove. “That we’re all sinners, I suppose.”

“And didn’t Theo teach you the same thing?”

“Yes. Yes, if we did something wrong to one another. But with Aelfric, everything’s wrong. Everything that comes from our bodies, that is. If we want it with our flesh, it’s sending us to hell.”

“He teaches you the doctrine of hellfire?”

Cai hadn’t realised Aelfric’s grim vision was a doctrine. Belatedly he noticed that Addy’s robes were a cassock like his own, patched and worn almost beyond recognition. “I’ve heard of you,” he said wonderingly. “When I was growing up. A crazy old hermit, a holy man who lived on the islands alone. How long have you been out here?”

“Long enough to gain a reputation, it seems.” Addy poked the fire and gave Cai a wry look from under his wiry brows. “I was a missionary, a priest in far west Hibernia. For a while I was at Fara. Then I found that I could hear the voice of God much better in the silences out here, and I stayed. The years have flown past me—how many, I couldn’t say. Certainly more than your lifetime.” He sighed. “And the truth is that my chosen seclusion has now become necessity to me. They want to make me bishop, you see.”

Cai, who had just been about to apologise for calling him crazy, caught Fen’s sidelong look. “Bishop?” he echoed. “Who does?”

“The high men of the church. I prefer my solitude, though, so I am in hiding from them. The beasts of the islands take care of me. As I’ve told you, the eagles bring me fish to eat, and the seals come also, to receive my benediction and sing me their songs.”

Once more Cai nudged Fen, in warning this time. However insane this old man might be, he had rescued them, shared with them his fireside and his food. “Wouldn’t it be better,” he said cautiously, “to come back and live on the mainland? To have shelter and companionship?”

“In my lunatic dotage, you mean?” The old man grinned lucidly, making Cai blush. “Possibly. But the church I knew has altered so much in her ways.” He paused and frowned, as if this was a puzzle he’d tried to work out for himself many times before. “Not that they’re all bad ways. The word of God must reach the whole world, and you can’t do that with a handful of crazed Hibernian saints and visionaries, can you? So the church—the Roman church, in her wish to reform our wild island ways—is sending out men like your Aelfric. And since the voice of the wind and the sea won’t make men behave themselves, they bring with them doctrines like Aelfric’s, to hasten them into the fold.”

“Like sheep,” Fen said suddenly. “To frighten them into belief—whether the creed be good or bad.”

“I’ve lived in this creed all my life. I have to believe it good. But yes—like sheep, Fenrir the wolf.”

They stared at one another—the holy hermit and the Viking, each on his own side of a divide whose ancient depth Cai could sense almost as a physical thing. Into the crackling silence, he said, “Fen doesn’t see men as sheep. Nor do I, and…nor did Theo. He tried to teach us to think for ourselves.”

“He was a good man. A Gnostic, if you understand what that is.”

“Yes, thanks to him. One who finds God for himself through learning and prayer, not following in blind obedience.”

Addy’s eyes gleamed in what might have been approval. “As good a definition as any. Now, Caius—the monk who sits at the side of a Viking wolf, and understands gnosis, and has no truck with sheep or bad shepherds—what do you want to ask me? What did Theo say to you before he died?”

Cai drew up his knees. Theo’s last behest had been such a weight on him, and yet now that the time had come, he was reluctant to speak. His abbot had been living proof to him that a man could combine deep religious convictions with sanity. Cai was quite certain that Fara held no treasures, and it hurt him to think that Theo had believed otherwise—that such a chimera had been his last thought. “He said there was some kind of treasure at Fara. A secret. The vikingr believed in it too—it’s what they were raiding for that night.”

“That was all?”

“No.” Once more Cai hesitated. He hadn’t told even Fen this much. “He said this treasure would stop the raids, and I don’t think he meant the vikingr would just go away when they got it. I think he meant it had some sort of power. And—he was delirious by this time, dying—he said that the treasure lies not in the book but in the binding.”

He waited. His heart was thumping. He didn’t want to look at Fen, because something in his words had made a difference—Fen was listening intently, all the weight of his attention suddenly brought to bear. The old man too had leaned forwards, about to speak.

Then he looked both of them over. His examination was compassionate, but unhurried and stripped of all sentiment. He released a long sigh. “I am sorry,” he said. “My poor Theo. He was a rational man. But he loved his books above all else, and I fear his last thoughts became tangled up in them. Were they all lost?”

“Yes. But he wasn’t worried about that—at least, not about the one he was writing. He said that was only a copy.”

“Theo’s book? What was it?”

“He called it the Gospel of Science.”

Addy almost laughed. He caught the reaction, pushed it firmly down. Cai saw himself and Fen through the old man’s eyes—a dishevelled, faithless monk in fisherman’s clothes, and a barely tamed Viking raider whose face had lit up at the idea of treasure. “A little blasphemous of him,” Addy said, settling back. “Very typical, though. I wish he’d had time to complete it. And I wish I could tell you his message means something to me, but I know of no treasure. No secret. Young men, I must think about this, and pray, and I must do so in solitude. You lost your boat last night?”

“Yes. She was smashed to pieces.”

“How you escaped the same fate is a mystery greater than Theo’s. God cares for children and fools.”

“It was not God.” Fen clambered onto his feet, hoisting Cai easily up with him. Cai remembered how he’d blanched with pain on the training ground just the morning before, and wondered if the shipwreck had been good for him. “It was me. I am an excellent sailor.”

Once more the old man fought laughter. “Well, whichever of you takes credit,” he said solemnly, “I’m glad of the result. Companionship is rare for me, and I will gladly shelter you here for the night. But go away now. There is a stone hut down by the shore with the remains of some boats in it, perhaps belonging to the devils when they were still human enough to know how to sail. You may be able to patch one together for yourselves.” He nodded, gazing into the ashes of the driftwood fire, where spectral blue-green lights were shimmering against the morning sun. “Yes. Yes, go away now.”

 

 

Fen leaned over the hull of an upturned boat. He braced, muscles cording up and down his bare arm, and tore a length of planking away. He examined it critically. “Rotten at both ends, but sound enough in the middle.”

Cai put out a hand. Fen tossed it to him, and he fitted it into a gap in the ancient fishing boat they were repairing. He hammered it into place with a rock, crushing the rotten ends tight into the good wood. That would form a kind of seal, and the clay pit a little way up the shore would provide caulking for the rest. He sat up. “That’s the last of the holes. The big ones, anyway—for the rest we can just bail. It’s not a long trip, if we catch an incoming tide.”

“All right. Let’s haul her out and have a look.”

Cai got out of the hull where he’d been working. He picked up the prow, and Fen went to grab the battered stern. They dragged her out of the crude drystone boathouse that had stopped her from eroding to splinters and dust over the years. She was heavy, but Fen didn’t flinch, and he set her down on the runway outside with a dazzling grin. “She looks good.”

“Better than she has any right to.” Cai eased down his end, grateful that none of his repairs had snapped out of place. “Speaking of which…”

“Yes. I am better too. Your stitches came out somewhere last night, and beneath them I am healed. Maybe you were right, physician, about the benefits of salt water, or…of something.”

Cai had begun to wonder if something had been consigned to the seabed along with their boat. They had come down here in silence and worked quietly, only exchanging the words they needed for their task. Maybe a vikingr pirate could grasp at a brother-in-arms in a moment of danger, rekindle the fires of life with him, but afterwards… “I should come and have a look. May I?”

“You never asked my leave before.”

“My patients have to do as I say. If you’re well again, I don’t wield the same authority.”

Fen examined him from the far side of the boat. The morning was brilliant now, a brisk wind dancing in the light. There wasn’t much chance of concealment, for damaged vessels or for men. It didn’t seem likely to Cai that Fen had shared his doubts, but there was a trace of uncertainty on his brow, in the corners of his mouth. He took a couple of steps back and sat on the remains of the hut’s seaward wall. “Yes, then. You may look.”

Cai knelt in front of him. It felt natural, and it was the best place from which to undo his leather jerkin and the top strand of his leggings. Lifting both garments far enough aside, he saw that the wound had closed, its edges ragged but clean. New flesh, pink and healthy, had formed inside. “It’ll scar,” he said roughly. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? Thor counts our scars in our favour when we die.”

“No. That I did it to you.”

“We were in battle. And we were nothing to one another then.”

Cai looked up. It had been on his lips—what are we to one another now? But he didn’t need to ask. Answers to questions he hadn’t even known were forming inside him were there in Fen’s eyes. Fen put a hand on top of his, pressing it to the warm skin inside his jerkin, laying it over the wound. He leaned down, and Cai stretched yearningly up. They kissed with brief ferocity, then Cai sat back on his heels. He tugged the front of the leggings open with his free hand. He’d noticed in some lightning-flash instant the night before that Fen had dispensed with the subligaculum cloth, just as he’d left his own behind him with his cassock on the storeroom floor. Easier to get to… He gasped and swallowed hard as Fen’s shaft rose, then without hesitation—the moment before memories of Leof, of doing this for him, could rush in—he dived down.

Fen grabbed the hair at his nape. Pulling away, not claiming him. Cai sat up. “What’s the matter?”

“This…”

“What about it?”

“Among the Torleik, it’s…something a lesser man does for a greater.”

Cai stared at him. In Leof’s case, that had probably been true. No, certainly true—as time went on, Cai understood more and more what strength had lain in that gentleness. What strength such gentleness took, to survive unsoured in a rough world. “Do you think,” he growled, “a lesser man is about to do it to you now?”

Again, that silent answer. Cai would never have believed that face could soften in surrender. The clasp at his nape became a caress. “No. Please.”

He was big, and Cai took him carefully. The small noises he made sent red pulses of arousal into Cai’s groin, but he kept his hands off himself, stroking and grasping Fen’s thighs until he’d accommodated what he could of the long shaft. Fen kept very still, electrical as pent-up lightning under Cai’s touch. What was it costing him not to grab, paralyse, thrust? The great hands released him and fastened convulsively on the stonework, a clutch that would have cracked Cai’s skull. And now he did move—small shifts of his hips, the movements of Cai’s peaceful ocean yesterday before the storm, infinite power stored up and waiting. He braced his feet on the sandy floor and let go one desperate moan.

The sound of it washed all of Cai’s caution away. He closed his mouth hard around Fen’s straining cock and let him slide deep into his throat. He couldn’t breathe, but that mattered less than getting him inside, sucking him, making those half-anguished cries rip from him. Tears burned him blind. He hung on, twisting his fists into the deerskin, the swollen shaft-head ramming further and further into him—unbearable, perfect.

Fen went rigid, muscles of his thighs locking tight. The pressure in Cai’s throat became a rush, a melting heat, and he swallowed and swallowed to keep from drowning. Red haze threatened him, but he hung on still, pushing through it, wanting every wild pulse of Fen’s coming, meeting every one of them halfway.

Fen caught him. He dropped to his knees with him onto the sand. Cai leaned against him, brow pressed to his shoulder, coughing and snatching great lungfuls of the sun-bright air. Fen was shuddering, his own breath ragged. He felt at Cai’s groin. “You’re still hard.”

“Yes. I was…” Cai waited till the words would come out whole. “I was…occupied.”

“Aye, almost suffocating yourself on me. Gods! I thought you would eat me alive.”

“Maybe next time.”

“Or I will eat you.”

Cai raised his head and looked into the eyes of the wolf. A deep, delicious fear unfolded itself, stretching his erection harder. “Will you?”

“Maybe I will start right now. You smell good enough. Lie down.”

“Here? It’s damp.”

“You did it in the sea last night.”

Cai grinned and subsided onto the stones. The moment’s resistance had been feigned—he’d have lain down in fire if Fen had asked. He spread his thighs, moaning, while Fen unfastened him and leaned in close.

The hot mouth engulfed him—paradise, with a sharp scrape of teeth. He grabbed Fen’s shoulders. “Careful, you savage.”

Fen sat up briefly, his face avid, a wicked smile curling one corner of that handsome, dangerous mouth. “Forgive me. I’ve never…”

“Never been the lesser man before?”

“If you must put it so, yes.”

“Well, take some instruction. Run your tongue up me first. Open a bit wider and… Oh, God,” Cai breathed. Fen had obeyed him on the instant, putting the lesson into practice. “Let your lips cover your teeth. Yes.”

Yes. Cai fell back, raising his arms over his head in surrender, hiding his face in the crook of one elbow. He forgot Leof and Ben, and Theo, and the secrets and treasures of Fara. He forgot about death, in the rising flood of red-hot life Fen was calling up from his bones. He angled his hips, and Fen seized his backside, lifting him to be devoured. His vision blurred, and the flood rose high, and just for a while he forgot.

 

 

It took all afternoon to caulk the boat. The walk to the clay pit was a rough one, and the business of scraping damp clay into a makeshift pail arduous, straining backs and shoulders. Cai and Fen spoke very little, and looked at one another less. The work needed doing. Back at the boathouse, they took up position on either side of the repaired vessel’s hull and began the laborious task of spreading the clay. Cai’s hand brushed Fen’s, and the spark leapt, the flash of a flint striking stone above dry kindling. Their hands clasped tight.

“No,” Cai whispered, still not daring to look. “Not unless you want to spend the rest of your life on this island.”

“You’re right. The clay will take some time to dry.”

“The rest of the day at least. So…”

“So?”

“So you have to let me go.”

They went back to work, and this time didn’t pause until every crack and hole in the woodwork was packed tight. Then Cai straightened up, rubbing a handful of dry sand between his palms to clean them. The sun had passed zenith and was blazing over the monastery to the southwest. Only a narrow stretch of sea divided Addy’s retreat from the mainland, but in this light the Fara buildings, all the pain and joy that had reverberated within their walls, were nothing but a handful of glitter. Even the great rock on which they stood could have been cut from papyrus in this light. If you want to spend the rest of your life on this island… That was old Addy’s desire. Cai too could see the charm.

Fen came to stand beside him, and the charm became clearer still. “We have hours of daylight yet.”

“Yes. The boat should dry.”

“Our work is done, then. I don’t imagine your crazed hermit will want to be disturbed in his prayers, so…”

“I’m not sure he’s all that crazed. So?”

“So…we have time. Sunlight. Sand dunes and soft beds of thyme. I would do with you…” He faded out, voice roughening, a little rasp that raised the hairs all up and down Cai’s spine. “What you could not do with Leof.”

He’d used the word fuck without hesitation before. What had changed? Everything, the wind-voice breathed in Cai’s ear. Everything has changed. “What—with an old man running around, and bands of inbred cannibals prowling?”

“We will find a place. I will keep watch.”

“Even while you’re…” Cai shook his head. He couldn’t say it either. He wondered if Aelfric had ever experienced desires of the flesh so intense that they passed into the spirit, and then beyond words. “Even while you’re doing that?”

“Yes. And so will you. You were a warrior before you became a monk, and long before you lay down with me. That’s what you’ll be when everything else is gone.”

Cai frowned. It was a solid Viking compliment, but he wasn’t sure he liked it. “That doesn’t enthrall me.”

“What else would you have?”

“Your idea of a beautiful death might be a battlefield one. For myself, I’ll take a long life and a warm bed at the end of it.”

“Would you? When you left Fara yesterday, I didn’t think you wanted to last until sunset.”

“Well, I almost got my wish.” Fen passed an arm round his waist, and he shivered in surprise and then returned the gesture. “But everything’s changed. Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“The dunes. The soft beds of thyme.”

 

 

Fen was right—they both were inveterate warriors. Cai caught himself assessing their chosen dune for defensibility even before they’d reached it, and he knew he’d have done so without the Viking’s suggestion. High, isolated a little way from the rest. Good lines of sight all around, and plenty of crisp marram grass to give away intruders.

Tucked away behind its crest, a perfect crescent of white sand. Cai stepped carefully around its edges. Its surface was unmarred, shining like the inside of an oyster shell in the sun. He didn’t want to disturb it till they both did. Then they would rip it to hell. He didn’t know how it would be, but he knew there’d be a fight, a combat he longed for and hungered to lose. “Fen…”

Fen was immobile on the ridge of the dune. His back was turned, his attention fixed on the mainland. Afraid their peace was already about to be shattered, Cai scrambled up to join him. “What is it?”

“I have understood something.”

He was quivering finely, like an arrow drawn against a string. Cai wouldn’t have known it, but the tense vibration transferred itself when he laid a hand to his arm. “What? Is something wrong?”

“This island—they call it Fara, yes?”

“Yes. Well—all this scatter of islands are called the Faras, but this is the largest, so yes.”

“Fara, the island. And the place where the monastery stands…”

“Fara too, but not an island. Peninsula, not insula.” The words felt more than usually awkward in Cai’s mouth. He didn’t want to be up here talking Latin to this man. He was sure that, a little time more in each other’s company, they would smooth out the differences in their north-lands tongues and be able to speak as their natures intended. “What about it?”

“The Fara treasure. Our legends say it lies on the island of Fara. Insula, not peninsula.”

Cai chuckled. It wasn’t funny, but he could see a bitter irony. “Great. So you lot have been knocking seven bells out of my poor monastery for nothing? Didn’t you know the difference?”

“It looks like an island from the sea.”

“Well, next time you see them you can tell them to leave off, can’t you? They can come and raid…” Cai fell briefly silent, his mouth drying. “Oh, for God’s sake, Fen. You can’t think there’s anything here.”

Fen took hold of his sleeve. He pulled him down into the bright crescent, rucking up its surface. “Sit,” he said, a trace of command in his voice Cai was more than half-inclined to argue. “There are things I haven’t told you about the Fara treasure—just as you didn’t see fit to tell me all the things you said about it to the old man.”

“That wasn’t on purpose. There hasn’t been time, and—”

“And you hardly knew me. Very well. The same constraints have been on me, but now you have to listen. I need your help.”

Cai couldn’t understand the change in him. He’d perked up at Addy’s fireside, but this was different—a feverish distress beneath his eagerness. “You’ll have it, if it doesn’t mean outright murder,” he said, trying to smile, immediately regretting his choice of words. What did he expect of the wolf? “Tell me now.”

“According to a prophet of my people, the Dane Land tribes once held a treasure, an amulet of infinite power. It could even bind our gods. And many years ago, one of the followers of Christ stole this amulet and buried it on a holy island off the east coast of Britannia.”

“But there are dozens of those. Why are we feeling the business end of Thor’s hammer?”

“Our prophet had a new revelation over the winter this year. He named Fara. You do not understand about this treasure, Cai, and nor did your abbot. No man not born a Dane could ever understand. In our enemy’s hands, it has the power to bind our warriors’ might. To suck the wind from our sails, cause our swords to snap and our proud manhood to wither.”

Cai looked innocently out to sea. He still had hopes of this refuge amongst the dunes. He said, thoughtfully, “God forbid.”

Briefly he thought it had worked. The fever-lights in Fen’s eyes warmed to gold. He was laughing softly when he took Cai into his arms, and his kiss was so thorough and carnal, the push of his tongue so deep, that everything else faded away. Then he pulled back. He kept a warm grip round Cai’s shoulders, but he was pale in the tapestried patterns of the marram-grass shadow, his profile set and fierce. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet. But my people—the Torleik men, Sigurd and Gunnar and all my clan—believe in it. That’s why the monastery raids have been so unrelenting. But this is the island of Fara, right here.” He got up, letting Cai go. He took up position on the dune’s western ridge, the light wiping out his details from behind, leaving only a black silhouette, the ageless shape of a warrior. “I will find the amulet. Then Sigurd and Gunnar will come to me, and they will find it in my hands. And the world will change.”

“I thought… I thought you’d decided your brother was dead.”

“What if he is not?” Fen didn’t move. He might have been cast in bronze there and left as a warning, a memory of fear. “What if he lives, and…he ditched me here, like a dog or a broken shield? Like a thing?”

“He wouldn’t have.” Cai sprang up. The faceless statue spoke like a man, a living soul stricken to the core by something far worse than Cai’s sword. Cai climbed up to join him, took his hand—more like a child than a lover this time, folding his fingers tight into his own. “He loved you. You told me so yourself.”

“He loved power.”

“Fen, come on. Never mind ancient treasures and fantasies. Lay me down here and show me what I’ve been missing.”

Fen tore his fingers free. He gave Cai one look—half-anguished, half-amused, as if Cai had come up with the one proposal that might have slowed him down, diverted him from his purpose. Then he turned away. He set off down the slope of the dune, his long stride devouring the ground. The lowering sun struck blood-scarlet lights from his hair.

“Help me,” he yelled back to Cai, not glancing round. “I’ll lay you down later, and you’ll never forget it. But for now—we’re going to find this damn treasure!”

 

 

Cai couldn’t sleep. He was dirty and bruised, and darkness had fallen too suddenly for him to go and bathe in the sea as he’d wanted to do. Addy, sharing with them a fireside supper of scurvy grass and salmon, had warned them against venturing too far from the cave in the night. The devils were restless then and prone to hunt, their weakened eyes more effective in torchlight than under the sun. The old man had seemed different when Fen and Cai had returned. His air of distracted hospitality had vanished, and he had eaten in silence, watching them gravely from his own side of the fire.

The cave was barely wide enough to accommodate the three of them, and Fen had offered to take a watch, although Addy had assured him that wasn’t necessary. He was crouched outside in the cloudy moonlight now, his tense, powerful shape just visible. Cai was relieved not to be forced into close quarters with him. He felt as if some kind of padding had been stripped off his nerves, leaving them naked and vibrating to Fen’s slightest touch. In the boathouse that morning it had been wildly pleasant, and now…

Now he was afraid. He’d gone with Fen, and he’d done his honest best to help him find the secret of Fara. All afternoon and into dusk they had quartered the bare little island. He had turned over rocks, followed streambeds to their source. He had met Fen coming up to meet him a dozen times, his face a baulked blank, frustration coming off him in waves. A dozen times he’d told him to give it up, and a dozen times been ignored.

To say that he wasn’t the man Cai knew would be absurd. What did Cai know of him? Shifting uncomfortably on the cave’s rocky floor—how luxuriant even his own thin mattress at Fara, by contrast—Cai remembered a beautiful hound his father had traded for and brought into the hillfort camp. The seller had been evasive about the beast’s ancestry, although her upswept yellow eyes ought to have given her away. She’d been good for a while, herding Broc’s cattle and sleeping at the foot of his bed, and then one full-moon night she had plucked up a baby by its nappy rags and trotted away with it into the unknown. A wolf in the fold, Broc had fulminated for weeks afterwards, damning the trader to a hundred gory deaths, never seeming to realise that he’d opened the gates to the sheep-fold himself and let the creature in.

Cai dropped into exhausted sleep at last, and dreamed restlessly of a man with golden eyes who followed him into the dunes, brought him down with one breathtaking pounce and began to tear him apart. The dismemberment was painless, the rip of sharp incisors a shuddering delight, and when he protested—painlessly bleeding, dying—the wolf looked up at him and said, But you let me in, you fine man. You lay down with me. You let me in.

He woke up, throat convulsing in a choked-off howl. The cave was full of cobweb light, delicate as pearls. Every detail of the scene before him was perfect, so lucid he would take it with him to his grave. Addy was lying flat out on his back. His mouth was open, his long, thin frame nothing but a loose collection of bones beneath his cassock. And, rising up from a crouch of dreadful, virile beauty beside him—Fen, a fisherman’s knife clutched savagely tight in his fist. Before Cai could move or make a sound, he was gone, silent and swift, dissolving into the sea mist that had come in with the tide.