“Yes.I’ve dealt with worsewith none at all.”He groaned, Cai’s tip pushing into him.“Nothingbigger, though.Gods, I take back…everything I said about…castratedmonks.”
To be conjoined with him likethis—slowly, lit by common day—was more shattering to Cai thantheir wild encounter in the lantern’s flame.Fen sank down on himuntil Cai was buried in him to the root.For a long time both satstill, the only sound their ragged breathing, Fen plying unsteadyfingers through Cai’s hair.Then he began to rock himself.Themovements were tiny, but Cai felt each one as a sweet, wrenchinggrind, crushing his cock in its tight engagement.He wrapped hisarms round Fen’s waist.A ray of dusty sunlight found its waythrough the window to the east, setting the pale skin alight withunearthly radiance.
Cai kissed his collarbones, suckedbriefly at the hollow of his throat.“You look like the god ofdawn.”
“That’s a goddess.Eostre.And…not very Christian of you.”
“I don’t care.Come for me.Come.”
Fen rose up, arching his spine.He put hishead back and let go in a silence more intense than any scream.Hiscock jetted hard, whiplashing Cai’s stomach and chest with hisseed.When he was done, the last spasm finished, his flesh hot andtight all up and down the length of his impalement, he took hold ofCai’s shoulders.“Lie down with me,” he whispered, his voice inrags.“Lie down, like we said.”
“But you’re finished.I…”
“Just come here.”He fellback, lithe and irresistible, part of the force that drew allthings down into the earth.Cai went with him, shuddering, stillburied deep.Fen opened his thighs, wrapped his legs round Cai’ships.“That’s it.God, yes—put your weight on me.Fuck me till Ican’t see or think anymore.Do it, Cai, beloved—do itnow.”
The dew was still heavy on thegrass when they left the barn.Cai looked at the glistening strandsof marram in disbelief—that a world could be transformed before theday had properly begun.Cai, beloved—he had taken the words, folded them carefully andplaced them in the back of his mind.Endearments blurted out inpassion’s extremity were too sweet, too fleeting to set store by.And yet still the world was transformed.He yawned, stretching, andFen came and caught him from behind, nuzzling the side of hisneck.
“Stop it,” he saidhalf-heartedly, watching a spider swing one silver thread from fernto flowering bramble.“We have to be monks again.Our day’s laboursstart now.”
“We just mucked out acowshed.What more do you want?”
Cai grinned.It hadn’t been the mostpoetic termination to such a night, but he’d felt guilty about thebeasts he’d supposedly been out here to tend.The calves were nonethe worse for the strange noises that had issued from the back oftheir barn all night.Dagsauga, however, had bestowed upon themsly, placid looks from under her lashes, making Cai laugh as he andFen shook out the straw and filled the manger.“Well, I’m certainit will go downhill from here.”
“Until tonight, perhaps.Can youfind more pregnant oxen to look after?Kindly remember—Ineverwasamonk.”
“Fen.Let go of me.Maybe we have time togo and wash in the rock pools.”
“Mmm.I like the sound ofthat much more now than when you first suggested it.”
“Bloody insatiable,” Caisaid wonderingly, aware his struggle to be away was unconvincing,his disapproval undermined by the new rush of blood to his groin.“Wait till I get you in that water.The sun hasn’t touched it yet.The last thing on your mind will be—”
“Caius!Cai!”
They sprang apart at the voice, justin time to see Brother Gareth come pelting through the gorsebushes, his cassock hitched inelegantly up above his knees.“Oh!Cai, there you are.Thank God.Brother Hengist’s gone and choppedoff his finger with a butcher’s knife.And, Fenrir, begging yourpardon, but Wilfrid says, if you’re back from your hunt, please tohelp him fetch back the goats, which ate their way out of their penlast night.”
Cai exchanged a look of wearyamusement with Fen.He set off down the track, the Viking fallinginto place at his side as if he’d walked there all his life, Garethjogging impatiently ahead.“Hengist has actually cut hisfingeroff,Gareth?”
“Well—maybe not all thewayoff.But there is an awful lot of blood, and he’s fainted, and Eyulf isscreaming.And Wilf doesn’t know how the goats chewed a holethrough a new willow fence.But the moon was full lastnight—everything was strange.Brother Demetrios swears he heardwolves howling.”
Chapter Eleven
Another full moon, this time golden asthe barley Danan said would ripen in the husk by such light.Caiwasn’t so sure of that.All his life he had worked alongside thefarmers at the hillfort to get the crop in at harvest moon, butonly because mornings could dawn grey and stormy at this time ofyear, the summer beginning to wane.Tonight Cai would roll up hissleeves and join his brethren in the one field well enough favouredby the sun and good soil for the barley to grow.He stood in thewindow of the scriptorium, the empty arch that had once glimmeredwith sea-green glass, and he watched the gilded orb rise from thesea.
He was tired, but he didn’t mind.Since the moon’s last waning he had worked wherever he was needed.He could see traces of Theo’s monastery rising up around him, andthere was no amount of time and energy he would begrudge to restorethat.Aelfric kept mostly to his study, a brooding adder.Fen hadwarned that there was venom in him yet, but Cai thought the man’swill had crumbled along with his little empire, built on the sandsof fear.He and the Canterbury clerics—including Laban, whoserebellion had been short-lived—observed the canonical hours and didnot complain when the church was not full, although Cai hadobserved that a surprising number of his brethren did go out oftheir way to meet the new rule.Cai did it himself when he could.There was a great beauty to it, a kind of stately dance, and therewere no more teachings of hellfire.
Freed of Aelfric’s interference, Caihad given his orders with more conviction.Now if he hesitated, oneor the other of his brothers would come and demand to be told whatto do.So it was that he had begun the restoration of thescriptorium.He had wondered at his own temerity—their bread andbutter didn’t depend on it, or even their education, since they hadno books to put in it.Still, it brought him a keen joy to see theburnt-out chamber swept clean, the tumbled masonry being mortaredback into place.And perhaps the books would come.
Over winter, when there was less to bedone in the fields, he might journey down to the Tyne monasteries,examine the libraries there, renew Fara’s supply of inks andvellum.Brother Wulfhere, their carpenter, had died in the firstraid, but his apprentice was at work on a new writing desk in hisspare time.There was a man at Traprain Law who knew the art ofglass.Cai allowed his attention to drift, picturing the room inall its glory, men working peacefully over their script andilluminations, the light of knowledge kindling hereagain.
There was a bloodstain where Theo hadfallen.Cai blinked, coming back to himself.None of them had triedto scrub away the mark.If Cai breathed deeply, he would catch thelingering stench of smoke and charred flesh—real, or just a memoryembedded in his senses, he couldn’t tell.He turned back to thewindow.The clean sea air could continue to sweep through thechamber for now.He leaned on the sill, let the salty eveningbreeze cool his brow.
He wasn’t the only soul here withsolemn thoughts tonight.On the rocks below, the shadows hadgathered into the shape of a man—Fenrir, emerging from nothing andalmost disappearing into it again, halting at the very edge of thecliff.There he sat and drew his knees up to his chest.Cai couldscarcely make him out from here.Conspicuous by day, with hisheight and his bright hair, at dusk he became part of hissurroundings, as if…
As if the night could swallow him.Hewas looking out across the sea.Even in the melting, merging light,Cai read lonely yearning in the set of his shoulders.Oh, they hadhad a month of it, he and his Viking.Cai didn’t think there wasone concealed refuge in the monastery grounds, one secluded hollowof the dunes, where they hadn’t found each other—stripped andsucked and fought their way into each other’s flesh.Cai was stillbruised from their last encounter.He had inflicted marks of hisown, and discovered that he too could make a man’s bloodsing.
He still didn’t fool himself that hecould fill up the empty spaces in Fen’s soul.Fen no longer spokeabout his brother or the Torleik tribe.His talk with Cai hadranged broadly, and Cai had found himself expressing ideas andthoughts no other companion had inspired in him, but Gunnar andSigurd had been consigned to silence.Cai hadn’t tried to rescuethem.They were the unknown forces still acting on Fen’s soul, andhow could Cai compete?All the life Fen had experienced before hisabandonment here, that whole world of seafaring, conquest,brotherhood… No, much easier to let it fade.
As if poor Fen could forget.Suddenlyashamed of himself, Cai turned away from the window.The steps fromthe scriptorium were still ruinous, half the stairwell burned away,and he made his way cautiously down them, slipping out throughcobwebby shadows into the night.
