The Reluctant Berserker (29 page)

“You’re kind,” he said, “and I thank you. But…am I not the glove to your hand? I would think you should be glad and not disturbed to find one with a nature so perfectly shaped to your own. Or is it the fact that I am not some cringing little catamite that troubles you? Would you like me better if I was?”

At the tone of anger with which he opened this speech, Leofgar grew tense against him, but by the end of it his rigidness had relaxed again. The hand on Wulfstan’s neck drew him in closer and tucked the top of his head beneath Leofgar’s pointed chin.

“I would not. But it would seem more in keeping with the way things are.” His voice was very gentle and quiet, but with a faint hint of amusement. In earlier times, Wulfstan might have fretted at the implication of laughter. By now he knew the kind of ordeal that would take the note out of Leofgar’s voice, knew he did not want ever to hear it gone again.

“It is strange,” Leofgar said, and if he was laughing, he was laughing at himself. “All my life I have known that things would have gone easier for me if I matched what I appeared to be. All my life I have felt I was some sport of God’s, created out of irony, alone among men. Now here you are, and you are my opposite. Out of all the men in the world, how likely that I should meet one so perfectly made for me? There is something at work here bigger than ourselves. Our wyrds have been woven together, and it is useless to fight it.”

Against the thatch above their heads, the rain pattered and trickled, and the damp air brought out deeper scents from the stored herbs. Leofgar’s voice was like honey turned into light—a haze of gold—and Wulfstan gave in to the call of his blood and wormed a hand up the back of the harper’s tunic so that he could rest it on the springy curve at the base of his spine, and tell the little bones there between his fingers like a rosary.

“Perhaps our souls got mixed up and put into the wrong bodies?” Wulfstan said, turning it over in his mind. “You would have made such a warrior—proud and fearless and clever—and I… There is a slave I know. He is content to be my lord’s boy while his beauty lasts, and he prepares now to become Christ’s after. I have envied him both things, though terror sat on my chest day and night at the thought that anyone might find out.”

Leofgar returned the favour, one long hand coming up to slide along Wulfstan’s ribs while the other returned to petting his hair. It delighted Wulfstan to think that the harper liked his red hair, shared with Judas the betrayer as it was. It delighted him almost as much as the ability to speak the truth—to have this man know all and not reject him.

“For a killer you are a gentle soul.”

The amusement had a tender edge, and abruptly Wulfstan felt mysterious tears prick at his eyes. “I have been so afraid,” he confessed. “For so long. I have tried to press myself into any other shape but this, but it… It springs back. There is no getting rid of it.”

Leofgar tugged at Wulfstan’s chin, raising his head for another kiss, this one sweet and slow, with an easy possessiveness about it. Leofgar knew now this thing belonged to him, he didn’t need to fight to prove it, but could settle down to cherishing it instead.

“I am not sure that I want you to,” he said, when it was done. “You challenge everything I thought I knew about mankind, but that’s a good thing. The world is stranger, and thus God is greater, than I supposed. I am glad.”

This too brought tears to Wulfstan’s eyes. Joy shook his bones and scoured them at the knowledge that this time he had shown himself and he had not been destroyed.

Perhaps it was pressing his luck too far to slide his fingertips beneath the waistband of Leofgar’s trousers and turn his face aside, burying it in Leofgar’s thick, unruly hair. Asking too much to murmur, “Will you fuck me, please,” with the scald of a blush all over him from want and uncertainty mingled.

Leofgar pushed against him with an abrupt, frustrated hardness. His hands tightened almost to the point of pain. “I want to, but I can’t. I can’t dishonour you like that—”

The joy suddenly muted to the point where Wulfstan could feel anger over the top of it. “I thought we’d agreed it would be no dishonour?”

He drew his hands away, and Leofgar turned over, stiff as a wooden doll, giving him his back. His voice was sullen, hard done by. “My head may agree, and God knows, my body is keen enough. Yet I would wake in the morning and think I had done you harm, and I will not do that. If you’re mine to protect, I must protect you from myself also—”

Oh, and now the patronising bastard was back to treating Wulfstan like a woman, was he? Wulfstan could have punched something, was surprised at himself when he did not.

“Even when I don’t wish it?”

“Even then.”

Chapter Twenty

St. Aethelthryth’s foundation could not have looked more beautiful than it did that day of fore-calm. All about Wulfstan and Leofgar, as they strode the final miles from Alrehethe to the foundation of Ely, fields of wheat were rustling, slowly ripening from emerald to yellow-green. For a long while the path snaked along a narrow ridgeback of land between two waters, and the edges of it were a deep black, where peat was being cut out and stacked to reveal a strong soil.

The foundation itself was the largest complex of buildings Wulfstan had ever seen. Two separate clusters of dormitories and chapter houses, refectories and scriptoria gleamed like the may blossom. On the right side the monks laboured and on the left side the nuns. The church in the centre between the two had been washed with yellow ochre and painted with circles and zigzags in blood red and lapis blue. For a long, incredulous moment, it looked to Wulfstan as though the whole building was made of gold and garnet, hammered and inset like a king’s buckle.

He and Leofgar came into the enclosure—into the scent of gardens, honeysuckle and roses—just as another party was leaving. This was a far bigger affair than they had encountered in Alrehethe; there were maybe three score of travellers on foot and almost as many again on horseback or in light wains.

They drew aside to let the pilgrims pass. A warrior, armed and gleaming silver, rode at the forefront of the procession. A flag bearer went in the centre, with the cross of St. Michael snapping above him. A cleric walked at the back, garbed in fine white linen and swathed in a green silk chasuble. Every voice was singing as they trundled out, and on every face was hope.

It looked like a pilgrimage, except that they were leaving the shrine, and on impulse Wulfstan walked along with them awhile to lean down and ask a farmer, “Where do you go?”

“To Rome,” the man replied, his expression a heady mix of terror, glee and reprieve. He feared the journey, but he was glad to be on it.

“My apologies.” Wulfstan trotted back to where Leofgar waited for him in the lee of the public stables, a monk at his elbow with Fealo’s reins in hand. “I wanted to know what made them look so otherworldly. So happy but so afraid.”

“It is a perilous journey. Many of them set out to their deaths.” The monk gave an imperturbable smile. “They leave all the cares they once had in this world behind them. To put one’s life down as if it were so much rubbish and pick up a new one in which you have made no mistakes—this is a great matter and a good one, as I have known myself. I was not born a monk, after all.”

“Yet here we are at the end of our pilgrimage.” Wulfstan cast an almost fearful gaze at Leofgar, for there was a part of his life he no longer wanted to put down. Not now, when they were so close to one another that the last barrier to their being one did not seem impossible to conquer. “What happens after it?”

“The lucky ones die on the way.” The monk bowed his head to them both and took Fealo to be stabled, fed and watered. “So for them there is no ‘after’.”

The remark made Leofgar laugh. Aglow with his smile, surrounded by sunshine and a thousand flowers, he was so beautiful it made Wulfstan forget to breathe, forget to think, shot through with a bolt of longing either to be possessed by him or to be him, for to be any other man was to fall short of perfection.

So he was looking down and blushing pink to the roots of his amber hair when Leofgar took his elbow and leaned in close. Pink became red—he could feel the shades by the increase of heat. “Go and…”

Wulfstan raised his head to see that kindness had joined the amusement in Leofgar’s winter-sky eyes. The harper tilted his head, observing, and tenderly tucked the lining back beneath Wulfstan’s collar and smoothed the hair back behind his ears, landing a little butterfly kiss on the angle of his jaw. All of this in public, where anyone coming or going might see.

Wulfstan quailed for a moment, and then he realized that anyone who was watching would suppose Leofgar to be his boy. Would think Wulfstan only a tolerant man, who indulged his creature’s feminine gentleness because it pleased him to be so doted upon.

Was Leofgar truly willing to have them think that? With his pride—why?

“Go and be pardoned,” Leofgar finished, his whimsical look fading into grief. “I must seek out my master’s friend and tell him some sad news. I will meet you back here when the bell rings for compline.”

At the words, the feeling of light and delirious hope—the feeling of having pieces that would slot together and build joy if only he knew which parts to pin first—slowly gave way to unease. He stood watching the harper walk, with that loose and springy gait of his, to the porch that opened into the men’s side of the double monastery. Watched him talk to the gatekeeper, all smiles and a weaving of hands and words that Wulfstan was beginning to believe was as powerful as any sword.

Only when he had gone inside did Wulfstan shake himself, take up the cloak of dread that had settled on his shoulders, and make for the church. With Leofgar gone, his own shade came on him heavily, made him remember Cenred, who—if he had only trusted him a little less—might still have been his friend. Cenred who had no champion but him, who might—for he had made other jokes equally cruel in his time—have been lying when he threatened to expose Wulfstan.

He had been hot, Wulfstan thought, as he passed into the dimness of the church, finding it empty and quiet now the departing throng had left. He had been hot with anger towards Cenred for betraying him. Then he had been terrified of Saewyn and caught up by Leofgar’s troubles. There had been no time to get past the hurt of Cenred’s actions and feel instead the grief of losing a friend.

Nor had he had time to wonder what it might have been in Cenred that drove him to betrayal—to push and push his only friend into sin entirely so he could expose it after. That was, in this place where a host of painted stars shone down on him, a sad thought.

In here, he walked in a wonder of art. Windows beneath the shingled eaves were filled in with glass, some of it tinted by strange design. Light filtered through the manifold colours, spilling on the floor like discarded jewels. The little rainbow-cousins drew lines on the forest of wooden beams that held up the ceiling, and picked out painted faces up there in the roof. Beneath Wulfstan’s feet, the floor had been laid utterly smooth, flagged and beautified with tiles covered in flowers.

The church itself was vast enough so that there was room for a smaller pavilion within. Wulfstan ducked inside and found himself faced with a great picture of the first abbess, St. Aethelthryth. Dressed in royal purple, with a veil as white as snow, she held up in one hand a picture of this very church, her other hand outstretched to bless him.

The artist had given her a closed, serene face with downcast eyes, not at all like the fierce presence who had comforted him in the mere. Perhaps there was something in the way she gripped her little abbey that spoke of her determination. He looked at her fondly, knowing she had seen him at his worst and that therefore he had nothing to fear from her.

In front of this picture lay a deep slab of stone, knee high, in which some person unskilled with the chisel had attempted to cut the outline of a woman.

Wulfstan stopped before he bumped into it, overwhelmed by the thought that here she was. Here lay the bones of the woman who had saved him from dark magic and despair, the one whose might convinced him he need not be ashamed for his desires. For if she could be both womanly and inflexibly strong, why could he not do the same?

“Lady,” he said, quietly to the tomb. “I came to ask you for forgiveness for slaying my friend. You know what is in my heart. You know I didn’t mean to kill him. I still did.

“He was my closest friend, and I was his only friend. I don’t know why he chose to betray my trust, when I had handed my heart and my good name to him, but I know his life had been hard and his spirit hurt by it. I think, perhaps, if others had been kinder to him, he might have been kinder in return. A wounded dog will bite. This I know myself.”

In a little voice very like his own, except that it came unexpected and said what he would never have thought, the saint whispered into Wulfstan’s mind. “He lived as you have lived. Believing himself worthless. Terrified of being exposed. His anger and yours were brothers, though his was colder.”

Wulfstan sank to his knees before her grave, feeling something light, something clear and brisk and bracing. He thought it was the truth. “Lady, instead I ask you to forgive Cenred for turning on me thus. He did not have time to confess and be absolved—and that is my fault. Let him not be sent to Hell for that. Put upon me all his sins and transgressions. Allow me to repent for him. If there is punishment due him, let me take it and bear it myself.