She bent with genuine concern to helphim up.“Brother Caius!What are you doing here?”
“Me?”Cai coughed and spat outbits of grass.“What areyoudoing?Godric—Barda—all of you, come here.Help me untieDanan and put out that fire.”He tried to run and found his pathblocked by Godric, fat and serenely smiling.“Out of my way, man.Are you responsible for this?”
“No, Caius.Abbot Aelfricsummoned us here.He has captured the witch.”
Cai grabbed him.He bodily set himaside, but somehow the move put him into the arms of the nextsmiling, muscular farmer.“Aelfric!”he yelled past them.“Tellthem to let her go.”He struggled against a surrounding wall offlesh.“In God’s name…”
“It’s in God’s name that Iact, blasphemer.”Aelfric leaned forwards in his sandy pulpit andtransfixed Cai with a blank, triumphant gaze.“I caught her diggingup dirt from holy men’s graves by light of a full moon.”
“She was gathering herbs, youidiot.Let her go before she burns.Danan!”
“There is no help for her.She will burn, and her curse will be lifted from these people.Thegrain will be cleansed.The apples will ripen on the bough.Thechildren—”
“Stop!”Frantic, Cai cutacross him.No grains or apples here, but he grabbed the nearest ofFriswide’s infants and held it high, quickly glancing at the rashon its cheek.He’d been wrong about the fleas.“These children havescurvy.They need to eat green plants, that’s all.It isn’t a curseor a…” The child gave a wriggle of discomfort, and he took it intohis arms, unable to handle it roughly even while visions of takingit hostage flashed through his head, of threatening to chuck itonto the fire with Danan.“Danan is a healer.She’d never… Wait.When did you take her, Aelfric?Last full moon?”
“Aye, and kept her whereneither you nor your savage could find her.”
Cai dumped the child into Friswide’shands.If mad, empty preaching was all that worked here now,perhaps he had some of his own.He was being hemmed in by thevillagers—not angrily, but absolutely—and he struggled to getenough distance from all of them to see into their faces.“Lastfull moon,” he repeated.“Think, all of you, for God’s sake.Whendid we find the ergot in the corn?When did your children fall sickand Barda’s goat die?”
“Why, it was after fullmoon,” Barda said.She was the only one amongst them who had lookedtroubled at the prospect of burning a human being alive, who seemedto be unswayed by Aelfric’s power.She reached out and gave Godrica slap, which almost knocked him down.“It was after full moon,husband!”
He turned and hit her back.It wasn’ta slap but a punch to the face, and Cai saw he had wanted to do itfor years.She was twice his size, formidable.He would never havedared touch her outside of Aelfric’s charmed circle.“Hold yourlip, wench,” he hissed at her.“The abbot has told us.She workedher evil spells from her captivity, to make us set herfree.”
Cai grabbed Godric by the scruffand hauled him back.“Right,” he shouted.“This woman—Danan, whopounds up rosehips to cure your children’s colds, and has neverharmed a hair on anyone’s head all her life, has suddenly taken tocursing and…” He gave Godric a shake.“And what?Evil spells?Godhelp us.Did you ever think your trees might have blossomed andyour children thrivedbecauseof her?And—and when this monster stole her andhid her away in some hole beneath the ground, the very earth beganto die?”
It wasn’t working.The trouble wasthat Cai didn’t believe his own words—not as Aelfric believed inhis.It would take a madman to hold such convictions, on eitherside.A creature who could blight the land or nurture it accordingto her will… No.He twisted around to look at the pyre.Dananhadn’t moved.Perhaps the smoke had killed her, or rendered herinsensible—he prayed so.She was just an old woman.Cai ran out ofwords and reasons.He dropped Godric like a dead rat and threwhimself at the crowd.
He could hear thunder.At firsthe thought it was only the pounding of blood in his ears, andredoubled his efforts to tear through the thicket of bodies, thehands that were holding him back.No one was hurting him.The womenwere even patting at him soothingly, as if he’d been a distraughtchild.They were justthere, solid and stupid and immovable as cattle.“Damnyou all!Let me go!”
“Blóð oksorg!”
Cai jerked his head up.No Saxonthroat could produce such a sound.The thunder grew louder.Thebarricade slackened around him, hands falling away, mouths opening.Astonishment and fear—at last, the placid, dreadful smilesdisappearing, like cobwebs in the blast of a good northwind.
Godric waved a plump paw back inthe direction of Fara.He gaped like a fish, and after a couple ofefforts got one word out.“Vikingr!”
“Blóð oksorg!” Thebattle cry rang out again.A thrill of terror shot down Cai’sspine, stiffening the hairs on his nape.He knew the words.Theywere very like his people’s own, and he’d been taught manyblood-hot Viking ones now, shuddering with passion in sand dunes,stables, barns.Blood and woe—yes, pure oncoming hell, bearing down out of thenight.Blóðok sorg, thelong, lonely syllables drawing out, like…
Oh, God, like the cry of a wolf.For aflashing instant even Cai was fooled, the villagers’ terrortransmitting itself in a wave of primal body scents.They werescattering around him.He was free now to move, to run to Danan andtry to set her free from the pyre.
There was no need.Thevikingrraider swept down.In his leather jerkin, his bare arms taut with muscle, he was everyshore dweller’s nightmare.Eldra was surging beneath him, hermovements so blended with his that they seemed like one creature.His wolf’s-head sword was buckled at his side, and in one hand heswung an axe.“Blóð ok sorg!”heyelled one last time, blazing past Cai at a gallop, sparing asecond to flash him a lunatic grin.Then he drove Eldra straight atthe fire.
He was as likely to decapitate Dananas save her.The blade of the axe flashed once as it fell, and ahollow thunk of metal on wood made Cai wince.He cried out in fearas Danan’s lifeless form drooped forwards, but Fen hauled down hardon Eldra’s rein, sweeping her round in a tight circle in time tograb the old woman before she collapsed.He shoutedagain—formlessly this time, a roar of victory and laughter—andhoisted her up like a bundle of rags beneath his arm.
The fire leapt skyward, as if in rageat the loss of its prey, blinding Cai to everything beyond it.Fenwas gone, the only trace of him a dying percussion of hooves.Heturned.The villagers were all staring in the same direction, theterror in their faces dissolving to confusion—and, at last, adifferent kind of fear, as if awaking from a dream.They began tolook like themselves again.
“It was Fenrir,” Cai chokedout, only then fully realising it himself.“Fen took her.He savedher.”
Aelfric let loose a shriek.There wassomething deathly in the sound—a kind of despair, as if some fibrewithin him had reached a breaking point and snapped.“Thou shaltnot suffer a witch to live!Thou shalt not—”
The tuft of marram grass on which he’dbeen perched tore out of the sand and gave way.For one eeriemoment he remained suspended, that clawed finger swinging to findits next target, feet poised over nothing.Then he dropped like abundle of sticks in a sack and rolled to the foot of the dune,limbs flailing.
The villagers watched in horror.Then—easily roused, easily swayed—they began to laugh.Cai pushedthrough them.This time they let him, and he shouldered his way towhere Aelfric lay, twitching and panting.
“No,” Cai said, desperatelystifling laughter of his own.“Don’t you see, he’s not well in hishead?Don’t follow his orders, but…don’t laugh.You,Godric—Blacksmith Wynn—take hold of him.Help him back to themonastery and call his brethren to take care of him.”
“No!”Aelfric lunged into asitting position.He was like one of the fearsome creations of theJews, the mindless, unstoppable golems who would carry out theirmakers’ vengeance to the ends of the earth.“The Bible commands!Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”
Cai could snap too.His doctorlycompassion dried.He took the abbot by his scrawny throat andshoved him back down onto the sand.“You think you know the Bible?”he snarled.“No man alive today knows the Bible.That’s what Theotaught us.A book written in Aramaic—translated through Hebrew andGreek into Latin… All it can be is God’s guideto us, not his sacred bloodyword-for-word commands.Things get lost.Words change.And Theotaught us those ones straight away, to show us an example.The wordispoisonerin Hebrew.Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner tolive.”
