The Reluctant Berserker (9 page)

Now she wanted to embrace and comfort him, for he looked so lost, as though he had been a long way off, watching himself act and puzzling over it. She thought again the thoughts she had put aside earlier. “Are you so very perfect yourself, son, that you must make yourself the right hand of God’s judgment?”

“I do try.”

She was relieved enough to laugh. “As do we all, and all fail, and all of us therefore must lay ourselves penitent at the Lord’s feet and hope for the mercy we are told must come.”

He took the basket from her, letting her pick up her skirts as they both ran back from the huddle of houses where the potter lived among shared fields, into the burh and the great hall’s warmth. The leather cloak flapped around her legs and water dripped off the hood, and she was no more than damp when they arrived, though Cenred was so drenched he might have crawled up out of the moat.

She watched his face light up as his friends among the warriors drew apart to make a space beside them for him, close to the fire, and felt love still, going all the way through her like the spit through a roast bird, when he turned to her and waited for her permission to join them.
He is proud of me,
she thought.
No matter what he says of my work, he is proud of his mother.
It made everything feel well again. A little pebble of unhappiness to swallow, instead of a boulder.

“Will I try to teach you again?”

“I would rather not, Mother. I am not suited to it.”

You used to be,
she thought,
in those old days when you would trail after me, with rips in your knees and armfuls of muddy roots, with tangled hair and a smile that took up half your face. Before your father filled your heart full of stones. But you are the man of the household now and I suppose a man has to put down childish things.

And all the strivings of the world are vanity. All of it shall be lost.

She smiled and inclined her head beneath the supple gape of the hood. “As you wish. I would not force you to go where your heart tells you you do not belong.”
I do not have that kind of influence over you any more.

It should have been a hopeful thought. It was not.

The ice creaked beneath Wulfstan’s bone skates, and the air was like a knife in his throat. It tasted of steel. St. Polycarp’s day had come with deepening snow, the last—so the farmers hoped—of the season. Soon there must come a thawing, so that mud-month might soften the earth for planting. Today the old and the soft were warming their stinging hands by the fire, and Wulfstan and the other warriors were at play, chasing one another over the deep ice of the fish pond, enacting skirmishes and ambushes throughout the burh, armed with chunks of ice and balls of snow.

It was serious work, he knew, for the Vikings were growing ever bolder. No longer content to harry the seashores, they pushed their way further up every river every year. One day soon, he might have the chance to repay his lord for all the time and wealth squandered on him—the chance to stand in his defence and kill or die for him. Wulfstan believed he wanted it, but he could not believe he wanted it as much as some of the others, who spoke of the Norse raiders the way a man would speak of a half-cooked steak, longing to have his teeth meet in it and feel the blood drip down his chin.

Despite his temper, which came upon him from the outside like a bolt of lightning—as though it was as the old folk said, an inspiration from Woden, the touch of a god’s hand and not his own spirit at all—Wulfstan did not relish war. This… He slid to a stop in the centre of a great sheet of ice and looked out at clear deep-blue sky and the sunlight coming up yellow from the silvered land, at the trees with ice as thick on their branches as a flock of white butterflies, and the air scouring and tonic. This he liked better. There was something about the world when it forced mankind indoors and he was alone in it, that inevitably turned his mind towards God and glory, white and gold and clean things. He felt, on a day like this, as though he could get his fingers underneath the lid of the world and prize it up, and see all the unseen things that spun out the fabric of the world under its roots.

He took a deep breath of exhilaration that stabbed him in the nose with its cold, and as he did so a mass of wet snow hit him in the back of the head. Sliding around, not allowing himself to shudder or cough, he caught the glint of Cenred’s winter-sun hair. Ducking down beneath a boulder on the lakeside, he pushed off and gathered snow as he glided closer, and when his friend stood to take aim at him again, Wulfstan got him in the face with a double fistful.

That was the end of peace and contemplation for the day. Cenred came after him, roaring, and they hunted one another across the lake and out into the surrounding trees. There, Cenred stumbled on a root, and Wulfstan, his blood hot, leaped at him before he could scramble back up. They both went sprawling into soft snow, laughing, Cenred trying to get Wulfstan into an armlock, Wulfstan trying to pin the slighter man down with his weight. He got an arm across Cenred’s throat, grinning, sure Cenred would have to yield, but the sly snake, by some new trick, managed to slither out from under him, hook a leg around his and flip them both.

He found himself lying surprised in a nest of pressed snow, looking up at a smile that had turned strange. Instead of slowing, his heart sped, or perhaps the normal flow of time slowed down. Cenred’s guarded eyes and Wulfstan’s flush caused such a warmth about them he wondered they did not melt through to the forest floor.

Cenred had stopped fighting a dozen heartbeats ago, but Wulfstan couldn’t bring himself to take the advantage, twist and pin his opponent and claim his victory. This felt so much better. Held down, he felt grounded, completed in a way he couldn’t explain. As if of its own accord, his head tilted and his mouth fell slightly open. He watched as Cenred licked his lips and made a little darting movement forward, not quite daring to touch, and he knew he should surge up to meet it. He should claim dominance, or at the very least equality, he should not simply accept a kiss like a blushing maiden.

There was a puzzlement in the back of Cenred’s eyes now, and for a moment he was sure the man had noticed his surrender and understood it. The fear moved him to grab two handfuls of gilded hair and surge up to crush his mouth against his friend’s, using his moment of shock to gain the upper hand and roll himself back on top. Cenred laughed and bit him hard, kneeing him in the hip, while his hands—as if driven by an entirely separate will—were fumbling to untuck the swaddled layers of cloaks and tunics between them, to get cold fingers on undefended flesh.

Sadly, the moment it had become just another fight, the joy of it had gone out of Wulfstan. He grabbed his friend by the arms and used all his greater strength to push him away. The skin on the inside of his lip had broken, and his mouth tasted of blood, coppery and sickening. Cenred’s disappointment made him want to apologise, to explain—and that was too frightening a thing to contemplate. He couldn’t tell anyone what he really wanted, could he?

Oh, if he could only trust Cenred completely, with his whole heart. He wanted to, badly wanted to, the memory of desire like a fever in his blood, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He was ashamed to find that he too didn’t trust the coward’s son, though the man was his best friend.

Accepting, finally, that no more kisses would be forthcoming today, Cenred sat back on his heels and looked at Wulfstan sideways out of slitted eyes. “Why not? Since I’ve known you, you’ve bedded no women. Why not with a man?”

“It is a sin.”

“So is anger, yet you give in to that one often enough.”

“I have a besetting sin,” Wulfstan agreed, “so it’s best I do not add to them, don’t you think?”

“You want to.” Cenred leaned forward again and watched the changes in Wulfstan’s face as though he were tracking a rare and shy wild animal. What he saw there must have pleased him, because his disgruntled expression slid into a smile. “Ha! I thought you did. Think on the offer awhile. It will only be the sweeter for a little self-denial first.”

Chapter Four

This thought stayed with Wulfstan as the weather’s grip eased on the land. It made him keep away from Cenred, so that those who watched muttered that there had been an estrangement. He heard them worrying about who would calm and restrain him now when the wolfish mood came over him. No one else stepped in to be his friend, though no one dared be his enemy either, offering shallow smiles and words carefully measured neither to insult nor to encourage.

By St. Carantoc’s day, Wulfstan was lonely enough to disregard the strong hints he had been given about being unwelcome, and turn to his other estranged friend, Ecgfreda, for company. Though he still didn’t know what he had done to insult her, he went fully prepared to apologise for anything, if only they could talk again.

Ecgfreda was in the brew house, amongst her women, and the place was too forbiddingly feminine for him to dare to enter. But she came to the door when he asked, and bidding her younger sister and her closest maid to accompany her, she allowed him to walk her back to the bower house and stand just inside the door.

It was warmer here than in the main hall, the building smaller but with a fire just as large and all the walls curtained with second-best tapestries. At one end of the fire, seeing more with their fingers than their eyes, a dozen women worked at their looms. At the other, a round, well-fed lady crouched over a small brazier, stirring something pink with a small ivory spoon. The scent of frankincense was in the air, sweetening the already sweet smoke of the applewood on the hearth. A score of faces lifted, marking them come in, and politely lowered again, leaving them in what semblance of solitude it was possible to have when blamelessly visible under the gaze of witnesses.

Wulfstan rolled his shoulders—he always felt their gazes like a bridle. A harness to keep the dog from becoming a wolf. Sighing, he began, “I have been combing my thoughts finely, to find what I could have said to you that lost me your friendship. I can only discover that you turned your face against me when I asked you to be my wife. Still, I cannot see how what was meant as praise should have been taken as insult.”

He must have hit on the problem, though, for her polite smile had frozen in place, and there was something about her eyes that reminded him of the centre of the river, where the water flowed fastest and the ice was thin. She looked at the carved door lintel as if for counsel and then took his elbow and urged him back outside, bending her head down to whisper, behind the cover of a fold of her wimple. “There is nowhere we may talk of this in peace or open the thoughts of our minds in safety. I hoped you regarded me as your friend and I—”

“I do!” Wulfstan felt conscious that when the door was shut behind them they could no longer see who might have edged close enough to listen through the cracks. How long would it be before one or all of them came out on her train, like ducklings behind their mother, to be sure she was safe out here on her own with a man?

“I have
plenty
of suitors who would be glad to have me for wife,” she hissed, leaning closer. “When I look on their faces as I serve them mead at the feasts, I see their hunger for me, as if they would gladly starve if they could only gorge themselves on my regard.”

Wulfstan dropped his hand to his sword-hilt. The weapon spoke through his skin, whispering of punishment. “If you need me to teach any of them to mind their thoughts and hands—”

She strode from the door, led him up to the narrow walk that ran along the palisade, high above the enclosure. There they could be alone and yet fully visible, so anyone could see that all they did was walk and talk together.

The apples of Ecgfreda’s cheeks glowed pink in the cold wind and her small, catlike face had softened, as though his bemusement was better than what she had thought to receive at his hands. A scent of bread and charcoal clung about her, warm in the chill spring day as she smiled.

“It is a good thing in a husband,” she said, “to look at his wife as though she were pleasing to him—to look as though she were sweeter than honeycake and juicier than apple. You have never looked at me that way.”

This puzzled Wulfstan and disturbed him in equal measure. “You
want
men to look at you with desire?”

Again, his puzzlement made her laugh. “Indeed, for I have a hunger to match theirs, and I am just as much looking for a husband who makes my mouth water.”

He stopped, with the sun white under cold clouds behind him. Geese flew overhead in formations like ragged spearheads, their barking voices melancholy. Barnacle geese—hatched in the sea from little slimy things that clung to rocks. And though that was a strange thought it was no less strange to think that Ecgfreda
wanted
the humiliation of sex—to yield, to have her power stripped away and be made the recipient of someone else’s lust. Yet if she wanted it, did that not make it something that
she
did, rather than something that was done to her?

He felt, briefly but profoundly, a jealousy of her that griped at his throat and stomach like poison. Why could she have this and go from holy virgin to respected wife, when—if he had it—he would trip from warrior to nothing as if falling off a cliff? If she could have it and retain her honour, why could he not?

She misinterpreted his thought as a failure to grasp her meaning. Stopping, she drew her mantle more closely about herself and tucked her hands up her loose oversleeves to keep them warm. “You do not want me,” she said. “It seemed to me, in that case, there were two reasons you might have asked. Neither of which did you credit.