The Reluctant Berserker (12 page)

Then he was able to see that the black flood creeping over the soil of the firepit, going up with a sizzle and a stink where it met the live embers in their hollow, was blood. He went slowly slack in Aelfsi’s grasp, trembling and puzzled, while Eadwacer pulled Cenred up, and showed, underneath him, the long red-stained blade of the axe with which the firewood was chopped, and the great, gaping place around the severed ends of pearly white neck bone, where the fall and Wulfstan’s blows had driven the steel-sharp blade through the young man’s defenceless neck.

Chapter Five

Pope Boniface’s day, and Leofgar entered the small house he shared with his master bearing handfuls of dark thorny twigs covered with white flowers. It had been almost four weeks now since the old man had moved from the bed, and Leofgar’s world had narrowed down to wicker walls and fire tending, bringing water and porridge, hauling the frail body from sheets to pot and back. Anna remained lucid enough, but the flesh seemed to be rising from him like dew spiraling up into sunlight, and the skin left was too big for the bones. Only the quizzical humourous eyes still reminded him of the father he loved.

“May blossom.” Anna stretched out his fingers on the blankets as another man would have beckoned, and Leofgar brought it close, let him duck his face into it and snuff up the faint, fresh honeydew scent of it. “Praise be to God that I have lived through one last winter, so I may die with such sweetness around me.”

A tearing sensation in Leofgar’s chest made him drop the flowers onto the coverlet and turn away. He would have walked the four steps to the other side of the house and stood with his forehead pressed to the wall—this being his habit when he could find no other means of escape from his grief—but that Anna’s fingers lit lightly on top of his wrist, and he would not pull away from them.

“I wish you wouldn’t say such things. Winter is over. The spring is come and new life with it. Warmth and light. You will surely grow stronger now.” Rather than run away, he knelt, so he could put the trembling hand down on the covers and envelop it in his own. When that didn’t seem enough, he laid his forehead on top of it and felt the long bone of Anna’s thigh like driftwood under his cheek. “Tatwine says we may go to Rome. We may go to Byzantium. Think of the stories we could hear there, and the songs. It’s so hot, they say, an egg will cook on the pavements. Your bones will never ache there. We’ll go by sea and we’ll—”

“My son,” Anna whispered, firmly. “Your days of childhood are long behind you. Do not tell yourself lies.”

“Nnah!” Leofgar made an inarticulate noise and turned his head to press his watering eyes into the cloth.

“For myself, I am content,” Anna went on. “And I thank you, best of all youths, for all you have done for me this winter. It is because of you that I have died in comfort and not in sorrow. Bring me Lark.”

Leofgar’s own bones protested as he got to his feet, as though he had taken some of Anna’s infirmity into himself. He wished fiercely that it was true and he could do more. Gently freeing Anna’s harp from her bag, he took the flowers away and placed her reverently in the old man’s lap. Anna tried to tune her, but his hands were too weak for the pegs. After a long time struggling, he gave a sigh that might have also been a laugh, and pushed her into Leofgar’s grasp.

“For three score years she has been my voice, she has fed and clothed me. They laughed, those first scops to whom I showed her. No one had seen the like. They thought her outlandish, until she began to sing. After which they scrambled to have one like her themselves. But there is no other harp like her. I give her to you, along with everything else I possess. This is what I wish—you will not bury me like a pagan man in finery. You will strip the silver from my arms and the gold from my teeth.”

“No!”

Oh, what a tired gaze and yet what flinty hardness to it. “You have stayed here for me.” Anna plucked at a string, and Lark spoke, round and sweet and shy. “This I know. Now I give you my blessing to follow wherever your doom leads you.” His shaking hand returned to Leofgar’s wrist and gripped on hard while his face creased in agony and he laboured to breathe. “If it…if it leads away from this place. If you…need sanctuary. I have—I had—a friend, Gewis. He left the road before me and is now cantor in the monastery of St. Aethelthryth on the Isle of Ely. He will—for my sake he will take you in if you need it. I…I free you from my service. Go, wherever you will, and my blessing is on you, my son. My son.”

His eyes closed and for a moment Leofgar feared the worst. Leaning forward, he barely felt shallow gasping breaths against his skin. A kind of madness came over him. He took a bag and a seax and ran back out to the hedgerows to strip them of blossom.

The sun shone low and golden when he was done, and he forced may blossom through every crack in the house walls and between every rafter, over every surface, and through the chain of the cauldron above the fire. Just as the round shield of the sun touched the horizon, Anna opened his eyes and saw that he lay in a bower of blossom, little white flowers around him, thick as snow, but blushing pink in the light of the sunset. His last breath sounded like laughter before blood filled his mouth and overspilled, and he was gone.

Leofgar closed his master’s eyes, came back numbly to kneel by the bed again, where desolation hit him and, despite all the preparation, took him wholly by surprise. He pressed his face back into the bedclothes, draped Anna’s hand over his head and wept until his chest and eyes and throat were sore. Then he must have fallen asleep, for when he woke the hand was cold and rigid and held him down. The leech woman, Alfscine, was pulling him by the elbow to try to get him to leave, while one of her maidens laid out a shroud on the floor and another carefully but dispassionately was stripping his master of all his rings and piling them next to the harp.

“We’ll make him ready for his journey.” Alfscine used the tone she might have used to wheedle good behaviour out of a five-year-old child. “You tell the lord, so that he may put things into readiness. You’ll find comfort there.”

This did not have the encouraging effect on Leofgar’s mood she might have hoped. “I am not ashamed of women’s work,” he said, his soul revolting from the thought of having to speak to Tatwine now. “Let me help prepare him. I am…I am all the family he has. Please.”

So the second handmaid took the news, and Leofgar escaped for that night. No matter what folk murmured about the power of scops, he knew no song to stop the sun. The meeting was deferred only, and a reckoning would soon be due.

Tatwine did not summon him the next day, but let him pass the bright, windy hours firing shaft after shaft at the archery butts, while a new song came together from pieces of all those he knew and half knew and had ever heard before. Perhaps the lord recognised when a man was altogether taken up in his craft, or perhaps he had delicacy enough to allow Leofgar a time to mourn. Leofgar would have been grateful for it, if there had been any part of him left other than grief and music.

When he had built the walls of his house of song in his mind, before the archery practice strained the muscles of his back and made it impossible to pluck the harp, he retreated indoors, stirred up the fire and burned up every drying twist of flowers, filling his room with smoke. Anna lay now in the chapel, with candles at head and feet, and the small house was too large without him, the bed too large and cold, the very shadows on the floor too thin. When Leofgar ate, it was as though some unseen fiend had already consumed the goodness of the food, and he received only a husk of it, hollow enough to harm.

He bent his head over Lark and gave her the loss, bewilderment and rage that were coursing through his veins. Gradually, as the night fell and the cold crept in to lie by the fire, he could feel her learning him, turning to him, becoming his voice and not his master’s at all. It was that that broke him open and made him lay her down and curl up small in the furs and fabrics of the bed and weep once more, as though he would never stop.

At the funeral, horror and words of hope passed over him like clouds. Dirt went into the grave, and he took up the harp again and sang. And if there had been eyes that were not on him at the start of that song, they were dragged around, reluctant, by the end. For this was a broken thing—the rhythm halting, breaking into praises and choking off, falling silent midphrase, taking flight again into rage and denial that were wound through with mellow beauty and the consolations of faith.

Under his fingers, the harp shivered with shrill notes and eerie, with sobs and growls that transmuted—as his violently seesawing mind transmuted from one moment to the next—into soaring passages of melody and beauty, into gratitude and even joy expressed in sweet and merry runs of notes. The household had not heard the like before, and they looked at him now as though afraid of him—as though he were trying to rob them of their reason to soothe his own wounds.

He caught Tatwine watching him with both shock and recognition, Hunlaf elbowing his friend Deala with a look of amused contempt.
The harper has gone mad,
he was probably whispering.
Does not know how to bear his losses with decorum, like a real man would.
It was that implied rebuke that made him smile at the end of his song, though he would rather have wept more.

Instead he carefully slackened Lark’s strings, lest she break her own back when he took her into the warmth of the hall. He tucked her into her deerskin bag and thanked Father Colm for an elegy he couldn’t now remember at all.

The grave was a black stroke on a green page behind him, as though God had drawn a line to end the tale of Anna. As he drifted with all the other folk to the hall where they would feast in his master’s memory, Leofgar found there was some comfort in an ending properly wrought. At least now his master’s spirit would find the eternal city. How terrible if Anna had died on the way here, and Leofgar had had to bury him under stones, for wild beasts to overturn and gnaw. How it would have broken his heart to think of his master lying in unconsecrated ground, his spirit condemned forever to wander, when he was a man who had always wanted a settled lord, a rooted home.

He had it now, and it could never be taken away. The thought helped, a little. So did the business of the feast, when he could set himself aside and put all his mind to entertaining a crowd whose likes and dislikes he now knew. To ask forgiveness for the strange, inhuman music of the graveside, he now played everything they wanted, sometimes twice, and he sent them to their sheets smiling.

Tatwine had his bed on the high-seat dais, behind a screen. This was being set up by his slaves when Leofgar, hurrying away, collided with the lord himself in the porch of the hall. For a moment he was mazed in his mind, and a strange, frantic joy came over him at the memory of the warrior with the worried eyes. Then life poured over him like a stream of rain from the eaves and made him shiver.

Which Tatwine felt, it seemed, for he had grabbed Leofgar’s arms as if to steady him. Now one hand slid up and over his shoulder to curve around the back of his neck, warm and steadying and possessive. The touch made Leofgar shudder again as the deferred misery of the night caught up with him.
Why not?
he thought, drained and defeated by grief.
What could it hurt, except my pride, and I have too much of that as my master say…said.

He breathed in sharp and closed his eyes to stop the tears from spilling.
I could be gone in the morning and leave it behind. No one but he and I would ever know.

That is two people too many,
some deeper part of himself replied, just as Tatwine drew him in, awkwardly, to an unexpected brotherly hug.

“I had words I meant to speak to you,” he said gently. “But you are undone and it will wait until tomorrow. What was that music? It was as though Heaven and Hell spoke together. I doubt I will ever get it out of my ears.”

Leofgar raised his head, stunned and vulnerable and hating himself for it. Tatwine smiled at the sight. “No, that too will wait. Take the night for grief and sleep, and in the morning we will hunt together and remind one another that we at least live.”

The morning dawned warm. A light rain had fallen in the night, and the weeds that choked the drain beneath the eaves of Leofgar’s hut were fresh and green, bespangled with silver. He dragged himself out into the open air with bow on his back and only his bone whistle tucked up his sleeve, feeling naked without harp and lyre both. He would not risk them, slung on his back, in a horseback hunt through rough woods, over dyke and ditch.

Unexpectedly, Hunlaf himself brought a horse and stood patiently by it while Leofgar checked the girth of the saddle, strapped on bags. It was a remarkable service for a warrior to do him, who would more normally have sent a servant for the task. It would have been pleasing to see it merely as a deed of goodwill, but where Hunlaf was concerned there was no such thing.

“Thank you.” Leofgar tried to take the bridle from Hunlaf’s hand and found his fingers encircled by two coarse palms. He bit back the instinctive urge to flyte—to tell the man exactly what he thought of him, in fifteen lines of invective verse, full of alliterative insult and scalding swear words. Instead he simply twisted and jerked away. “Must every kindness come with an expectation of reward?”

“You are without a protector.” Hunlaf touched the bow of his lips with his tongue as if it helped him think, and smiled, smug as a rat with its paws in the butter. “You need not be. I have wealth enough. I would take you.”

“I hope you are not saying what I think you’re saying.” Leofgar had lost, with his master, the one voice that put a dampener on his pride and urged him to think of his own safety. Anna could not now be hurt by his actions, and he was for the first time free to do as he wished. “Because if you are, then I challenge you to defend your implication by combat or to withdraw it.”