Not afraid, and not in any hurry.Theygrinned as they waded in from the boats, took a moment to splashone another and bark cheerful insults back and forth.Darkening themonastery, muffling the bell, had been good strategy.These menthought they were coming to claim an empty rock.“Geiri, you son ofa goat.If I’d had to share that oar bench with your great fartingarse for one more league…”
Cai shook his head, as if he couldrattle the understanding out of his ears.Fen had taught him toomuch.He didn’t want to know about these brutes, their discomfortsor their humanity.“I could drink a river.I’m sick of the taste ofmy piss.”
“Hogni started drinking hisbefore we ran out of water!”
A roar of laughter.Cai squeezed hiseyes shut.He fought the urge to ball up.He’d only met his Vikingsin combat until now.It was easy to hate with a bellowing axe-manroaring down on you.How Fen had hated every living Christian atFara, until one of them had cared for him!The laughter rolling upat Cai was rich and familiar.It could have been Fen’s.
When Cai looked again, the world wasin darkness.Briefly he wondered if he’d wished himself blind aswell as deaf, and had his prayer granted.The moon was gone, agreat black cloud whose advance Cai hadn’t seen devouring her wholefrom the west.Down on the beach, the raiders were cursing, blamingone another for failing to notice the weather.One of them wascalling for a light.
“Bring the torches from theships.”
Cai clutched hard at the roots of theseagrass.This changed everything.Many torches, casting flaringfirelight up the flanks of the dunes, would expose the monks intheir hiding places as the dull moonlight could not.Fen’sstratagem of waiting, the moment he and Cai had worked out sopainstakingly when enough of the Vikings would be clusteredtogether in the defile—all that would fall apart.One torch,though… Cai knew how one torch in blackness could blind you beforeit began to help you out, how it cast everything beyond its ownnimbus into a void.
He took Fen’s plans and snapped them,crumbled them to dust, mentally brushed his palms together and castoff their ashes into the wind.Cai would give the signal on his ownjudgement now.The lighting of the first torch would save them.There was no moon now—in the dunes nearby he could hear someonepanting in panic at the lack of it, and sent out a silent plea tohim to wait, have faith, to believe—but the raiders’ first torchwould show them to one another, light up their target before theythemselves could be seen.In its way it was perfect.Better thanany tactic of Fen’s.Cai could be better without him.He couldsurvive.
He was sobbing when the torch flaredup, but so deep down inside himself that it didn’t matter.So drylythat it didn’t blind him, and the leap of battle fever in his bloodcame at the moment when his heart would have shattered.He feltnothing.
His men were waiting, terrified indarkness.Fen wasn’t in his appointed place and neither were thedamn Vikings.Cai had to make his move, and now.To make it strongand good.He sprang upright.He flung a hand into the air andloosed a cry his father would have been proud of, a bestial howlthat brought the monks leaping out of their holes as if stabbed.For a second it could all have gone to hell.They staggered on thedune slopes, discomposed, black rabbits as likely to run for coveras to fight.But Cai yelled again, this time pointing to theclustering men on the beach.They were shielding their eyes,blinking—too dazzled to see what creature was shrieking in thenight above their heads.Cai seized his moment, and the warriormonks of Fara attacked.
They blazed in on their wave ofsurprise, and it took them further than Cai could have dreamed.What warriors he had trained!Wilf took the first kill, goatherdturned berserker, lashing about him with his broadsword as if bornto the trade.Feint, parry, thrust—he dropped his target with thegawp of astonishment still on his handsome Viking face.Garethrushed in after him.
Demetrios the Greek, leaping aboutlike a deranged mechanical scarecrow, forgetting every damn thingCai had taught him but somehow making progress anyway, staying outof reach of returning strikes.Yes, they were fine.Cai, wading in,had an instant to love and admire them.The torch was out, knockedto sputtering death in the wet sand, but the moon had emergedagain, just enough for Cai to see, and what the hell had he beenthinking—of course the torch would go.He sent a prayer to theancient hillfort goddess of the moon for her mercy.For not lettinghim dump his dearest friends and brethren into the battle in thepitch dark, to flail around as they might.So much for Cai as astrategist.Fen would have stopped him—would have known.
Desperately Cai plunged betweenBrother Cedric and the axe slicing down on him, deflecting it withthe hilt of his sword.Cedric grunted, needing no secondinvitation.He jabbed as Cai had taught him, straight into theraider’s undefended gut.
They were outnumbered.WithoutFen, it mattered.The Vikings were regrouping, working out thatthey hadn’t been leapt on by demons but by men—men in skirts, thepuny castrated Christians who fell like wheat to their scythe.Thefirst of them who took the time to draw in breath for laughterregretted it—Cai dived in past his unready shield and ran himthrough.He spun to face the next.This one was not laughing.Hisface was a blur in the moonlight, great thick plait unwinding as hewhipped round for his opponent.He was lean and massive, coppergleaming dully in his hair.He focussed on Cai—God, amber eyes,cold as death—and snarled.“Blóð ok sorg!”
Cai lost peripheral vision.There wasa tunnel, and he was rushing through it.The sounds of battlearound him faded out.He raised his shield just in time for thewhole weight of the Viking’s sword to crash down on it.The raiderfollowed up with an axe-blade swipe that nearly tore the shieldfrom Cai’s hand.Something punched him in the ribs.Hot painconsumed him, knocking him down to one knee in the sand.It wasonly for a moment.Then the pain burned out in rage and hate, andhe surged up swinging.
He was back in the training yardwith Fen.Doyou ever hold back on me?Don’t you hold back on me!Fen had sworn hedidn’t.Cai had believed him.But perhaps Fen couldn’t helphimself.Perhaps when it was flesh you had loved, you couldn’tunleash your full Viking fury on it—not even to save it or teach itto save itself.
This Viking didn’t love Cai at all.Hewas bulkier than Fen, a fraction taller—otherwise his exactequivalent, and Cai was learning the difference.His blade hitCai’s with the force of a rockfall.Muscles ripped in Cai’sshoulders as he parried.He slipped away, got in one good stabbingthrust.The raider growled and retreated a step.Cai went afterhim.He would not allow himself to see how like Fen he was, so likethat he had to be kin.That he had to be…
The step back had only been to gain alittle space.Cai hadn’t even slowed him down.The great bladeflashed in the moonlight again and Cai flung his shield up—just intime to catch a blow so fierce that it deadened his arm.The shieldflew from his grasp and landed in the sand.Cai spun away, theswift dancer’s move that had saved him on the battlefield before.It worked—the Viking cleaved the air an inch behind him—butsomething was wrong.When he tried to recover, to whip back intothe gap he’d left and fight on, shield or no shield, his legswouldn’t carry him.He staggered.The beach beneath him, good firmsand for a skirmish, gave a treacherous heave.It knocked himsideways.Down on one knee again, he watched as if from five milesout while the raider grinned, took a double-handed grip on hissword hilt and prepared his final blow.
Time stretched and doubled back onitself.Cai had been hearing—for some while now, if he thoughtabout it—a shockingly familiar voice.Familiar as the smilelighting up the vulpine face of this warrior who was going to behis death.Cai raised his sword one more time.He scarcely knewwhy, except that he was his father’s son, and Broc would have hadan apoplexy to see him just kneeling here.The lively blade hadturned to lead, and he could barely lift it.He thrust away theraider’s plunging stroke and rolled out from under thenext.
The voice rose again, breaking likewaves through the blood-beat in his ears.Cai was down, finished.Bitter salt sand was in his mouth.He had no idea why he washanging on, deflecting his opponent’s frustrated strokes with hissword and then—last helpless gesture—with his arm.Noidea…
Except that Fen was there.Fen,hacking a path towards him through the heaving sea of bodies.Thevoice had been his—roaring out threats and commands, orders toregroup.He was laying about him withBlóðkraftr, slaking the blade with Vikingblood.Cai twisted like a cat and got out of the way of hisassailant one more time.A cry of joy broke from him.Fen stoppeddead—homed in on the sound, shoved the last barricade of raidersand monks aside—and came running.
Cai gave up the fight.It wassuch a relief, blissful as climax in its way.He thudded down ontothe sand, air leaving his lungs in a whoosh.Blóðkraftrswept over his head, a scythefrom heaven and hell.His assailant sprang back.Blade clashed onblade as Fen leapt after him, and then the unique, dreadful soundof flesh on flesh and bone.Hard-muscled impact and the snarls ofmen shedding their human skins in bloodlust and desire to rip oneanother apart.
Kindred flesh.On the edge of a faint,Cai clawed back.He struggled to his hands and knees.Kindred bone,kindred skin.Cai knew this—he knew Gunnar.Fen, his face afrenzied blank, had gone beyond such knowledge.Didn’t recognisehis brother.Cai lurched up.He threw himself at the entwined pair.“Fen, don’t!Don’t, in God’s name!It’s…”
One man fell.Blood staining hisvision like ruby-red glass, mind going dark, Cai lost track oftheir differences, forgot that a cassock marked one and asalt-stained leather jerkin the other.On a beach a thousand yearsago he had found Fen dressed in hides like this, his hair as wildas Gunnar’s.He had found him dying.Which one was this on thesand?
Gunnar.Gunnar, because Fen wasstanding over him, sanity returning to his face.Blóðkraftr, scarlet from tip to hilt, was dripping in his hand.Gunnar, because now Fen was dropping to his knees beside thecorpse, a cry like nothing Cai had ever heard before beginning torip from his lungs.
Cai’s training forced one last moveout of him.Fen’s back was unguarded.Scraping up his own swordfrom the sand, he staggered round to defend him.But there was noone there—no one who could make a difference anyway, not now.Ahandful of the raiders were retreating, splashing their way back tothe boats.Others, who had reached the cliff path and found itundefended, were clambering up there to finish their night’s work.And the beach was littered with the fallen—some in Viking leathersand hides, some in plain moonlit brown.
Fen was hunched over his brother.After that solitary wail he had fallen silent.Cai didn’t know howto touch him.He tried to stumble to Fen’s side, but his feet tookhim into the water, as if in some way he could get clean of this,clean and clear in the cold, redeeming sea.
The waves were marbled, veined withblack.Cai recoiled from the drifting pattern.Who had poured inkinto the lucid amber and polluted it so?He had a wild vision ofthe monstrous squid Theo said he had seen on his sea voyage here,and then a pure memory of Leof, poised in the scriptorium with afreshly cut quill in his hand.And then he remembered thatbloodstains by moonlight showed black.
Cai leaned his hands on his thighs andstruggled to stay upright.He surveyed the scene around him—thebodies, the scarlet-black tide.“Oh God,” he said brokenly.“OhChrist.No.Christ.”
Chapter Fifteen
