The Reluctant Berserker (27 page)

Even for one who earned his bread by them, it seemed such words were hard to get out. Wulfstan understood it—they were big words despite their simplicity. Each one was a stone in the river that divided them. Put enough down and they might be able to walk across, dry shod.

Wulfstan studied the bard’s profile, as Leofgar looked out to where their punt and the larger one before it were rounding the shoulder of the island. Another smaller isle came into view behind it, dark with turned soil and bright with ripening fruit trees. With the blaze of the water behind him like gold foil, Leofgar could have been an illuminated angel, except that his expression was full of doubt.

“I was not alone,” Wulfstan went on, hoping to soothe Leofgar’s doubt with his own certainty—hoping to share with him a little of what he had understood in the night of his terror and his salvation. “St. Aethelthryth was with me. I could feel her presence, and it gave me the courage I needed to destroy the spite and return the spirits to she who sent them.”

If talking was hard for the scop, it was a dozen times worse for him. He was not a man who spoke his thoughts—or he had not been so. He was a man who had always beaten his problems down with fists.

Cenred’s dead face flashed bright in the coffer of his memory. He could almost smell the gore again, see the beautiful pearly white of fresh bone. Yes, and look how well his fists had served him. Words had power, he knew that. Perhaps it was they, frustrated at being unspoken, dammed up and rising from day to day with greater pressure, that caused his berserker rages. If the thoughts could not come out in speech, perhaps they came out in violence.

If he could not steel himself to let them out now in words, perhaps one day soon he would find himself waking up with his hands tight around Leofgar’s crushed throat.

“I have been thinking about myself tossed between these two women like a ball in a game.” He tried approaching it obliquely. “Why do I think myself strong when it is Saewyn and Aethelthryth who contend together, and I am merely their token? It seemed to me that if those two women could reorder the world between them, command the unseen powers, and kill or save me as they pleased, then we men are overproud of our strength. What matter our unyieldingness when we are but pieces in a game that others play?”

Behind him, the fishwife belied her silence by snorting with amusement. “Happy is the house where the wife is wise.”

Leofgar laughed too and looked at Wulfstan with fondness, though it was apparent he had little idea why Wulfstan was speaking of this. “The old tales are full of women trying to stay the hands of hasty men,” he said. “But I could give you twice as many where they goaded them to strike.”

“There is my point. We think women weak because they must yield in the flesh, but in the spirit they wield us like weapons. Which is the stronger? The one who acts or the one who causes him to act?”

“Do you say this for me?” Leofgar looked baffled, unsure if he should be pleased or insulted. Clearly Wulfstan’s words had been coloured by his mind—like light passing through stained glass—to such an extent that what he had heard was as much his own creation as it was Wulfstan’s.

They drifted on almost silently, save for the splash as the end of the pole plunged into the water, and the clop of tiny waves against the sides. Above their heads a huge overarching sky curved from horizon to horizon in a dome as pale blue-grey as Leofgar’s eyes. Where it touched the ground, it met only the flat, smooth surface of the mere.

Though shapes yet moved beneath the transparent surface of the water, Wulfstan no longer felt fear of them. Let them be pike or droves of eels, or a slimy wyrm such as those Beowulf fought in the mere of Grendel. If they attacked, he would resist them or die in the attempt, but he would do so with the holy lady’s protection for his soul, confident they could do no worse than death.

The meaning of Leofgar’s question came slowly to him and reluctantly. He had to piece it together out of small clues. Leofgar still huddled close to his
hearpes
, wary and protective, stroking them with petting and comforting strokes. Wulfstan began to wonder if Leofgar gave Lark and Hierting reassurance because he wanted it himself. Could it work that way?

Perhaps Leofgar remembered being held down, being overwhelmed, not having the physical strength to resist. Such a thing must rankle in his mind, and he so proud. Oh yes, that made sense—Leofgar thought Wulfstan had said his piece about women to reassure Leofgar that he did not need to be ashamed. He had missed the point entirely.

“I have never thought you weak,” Wulfstan said, surprised that it needed to be said at all.

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

“But you…” Leofgar cast a look back at their boatman, who was apparently intent on threading them through the roots and reeds that girdled their destination for today. She had already proved she was listening in, no matter how seriously her round, freckled face scowled at the view. “You have valued me for the same reason my lord valued me. Now that I have had time to reflect on all that has happened recently, I must say that my answer to you would be the same as my answer to him. Though perhaps a little more regretful.”

A strange sensation. At the thought that—veiled as it was—Leofgar was discussing the possibility of having sex with him, the whole of Wulfstan’s lower body gave a deep, delicious throb, though his head was dismayed.

The larger punt slid to the side of a wooden jetty, and two farmers in cloth as russet as their fields came to help the fisherman unload Fealo. Their own boat came up beside and was caught by helpful hands, drawn against the firm planks.

There was something about the place—a place where Wulfstan could stand with one foot on water and the other on land—that made him think of himself. Had he not been balanced thus, halfway between one thing and the other, all his life? And was it not about time that he chose?

As they were jumping out, he committed himself to the holy lady’s protection and feigned a stumble. Leofgar caught him before he went backwards over the edge of the jetty into the water. With this excuse he could press close for long enough to whisper in the harper’s ear, “What I want from you is quite the opposite of what Tatwine did.”

Damn it was hard to say. His voice tried to hide in his throat, and his breath to climb back down into his chest and go to ground. Battle and swordplay had not called for the courage that these few words required. The truth, though it might cost him everything. “I want you to be him. I will be you. But I will not fight. I would not fight you, because I… It’s what I want.”

When he had pushed it past the hardest point, it came out all at once in a rush, like a baby. Like a baby it landed steaming and stinking in Leofgar’s unprepared hands. Leofgar took one look at it and recoiled, leaping away to stand as far as he could get from Wulfstan, rigid with shock and disapproval.

Of their own accord, Wulfstan’s fists clenched.

Chapter Eighteen

Leofgar had not meant to back away, but Wulfstan’s reaction made him glad he had done so. The warrior straightened up, all the diffidence leaving his form. Suddenly his strength, his calling, was all too apparent in the way he held himself—head up, back straight, the big muscles of his shoulders bunching like a bull’s as it paws at the ground. He took a step towards Leofgar, all coiled threat and grace. “Do not
dare
—”

An extraordinary feeling rolled over Leofgar—fear, sharp and exhilarating, and power with it, reckless, golden and mouth-watering sweet. The fear simply made the challenge more worthwhile.

Instead of retreating further, he closed the distance between them, put a hand flat on Wulfstan’s chest. Imagining reaching inside it for the heart and squeezing it between his fingers, he shoved back. “Don’t tell me what I dare.”

Solid contact through his hand sent a shock of warmth up his arm. He swore he could feel the heartbeat just as though the organ itself pulsed in his hand…and he almost forgot the onlookers, almost grabbed Wulfstan and threw him up against the nearest tree.

Fate saved him, for there was no tree available, only the drop off the side of the boardwalk into murky water, and that would not have served at all.

In later moments he would wonder what he had been thinking, to be so close to kissing—with a punishing kiss, as brutal as he could make it—an enraged man with a sword. At the time it was an unwary little boy who got between them and tugged at his skirts, breaking the spell of violence and sex that wound them both around.

“Are you going to the causeway, masters? I can show you if you like.”

Startled into sense, Leofgar looked away from the hell-bright heat of Wulfstan’s gaze, down to the boy’s venal, dirty little face.

“Yes,” he said, his voice strained. He coughed, working a throat that was parched as if he’d breathed in fire, and tried again. “Yes. Do so at once please. We would like to reach the guest house in Alrehethe before nightfall…if that is possible?”

“Oh aye.” The imp grabbed the bridle of Leofgar’s horse and grinned at an older slave who had just managed to scrabble up from his resting place in the hedgerow.

The older man crossed his emaciated arms across his breast and gave the boy a look of long-term rivalry. “This is my job, mayfly. Run back to the charcoal burners where you belong.”

“You got the lady”—the boy stuck out his tongue—“and a shilling for your trouble. I get this one. I’ve got to eat too.”

The slave ran a thin hand across his shaven head and looked from Leofgar to Wulfstan. His gaze lingered on the sullen embers of anger on Wulfstan’s face. He licked his lips and, keeping the boy between himself and the warrior’s wrath, reached up to touch Fealo’s stirrup straps. “It was a farthing, masters, that I got from her. Don’t let the boy bilk you, for he’s a good-for-nothing layabout, and you, I can see, have troubles of your own.”

Undoubtedly this concern had something cunning about it. When Leofgar pressed the sharp half moon of a hapenny into the man’s hand, the slave could not quite conceal his satisfaction. Leofgar appreciated both his timing and his flare for turning a situation to his advantage. He appreciated too the way this conversation had poured cool water on the fire of Wulfstan’s mood. If there was one thing both poor child and slave knew how to do well, it was to soothe the anger of more powerful men.

Leofgar could practically feel the thunder on Wulfstan’s brow thinning and the berserk mood falling away. Although the storm of it had brought out an opposing lightning in Leofgar’s blood, this had not been the place for it. If he had given in and kissed, he would only have shamed Wulfstan or himself. Neither of them would easily have stood for that.

When the slave knelt and offered his linked hands as a stepping stone to mount, Wulfstan shook his head, as one dazed who slowly comes back to himself. His knuckles pinked on his sword-hilt as his grip eased, and his back bent a little, until he had half resumed his usual stance of well-intentioned tolerance. “Lead on,” he said, the growl in his voice now more for show than for warning. “We’ll walk behind.”

So the boy, with Fealo’s reins in hand, preceded them down cow tracks edged with white archangel, and they came after, Wulfstan first, Leofgar following, in strained but no longer deadly silence.

How could what Wulfstan have said be true? Leofgar could not puzzle it out. How could a man so proud—so manly, so deadly, strong as an ox—be at the same time so weak, so soft as to want
that
? How could a man so worthy want to make himself worthless?

A tart voice in his mind spoke up to mention that Leofgar was another of the same inside-out sort. The matching half of the pair. For he looked the part of the eromenos—frail and helpless and beautiful—and yet wanted fighting men to acknowledge him as their equal. Except that surely all men should want to be as he was, and none should want the shame that Wulfstan wanted.

He turned over in his thoughts what Wulfstan had said to him when he was newly wounded—that he had killed one who had tried to be the man to his boy. That, Leofgar had thought was nothing surprising. Of course Wulfstan would want to make it clear to him that he might play at perversity—the way he had when they had kissed that first time—but that he was as appalled at the thought of taking it further as any proud man would be. Leofgar had supposed it was a warning, not to let his thoughts stray in that direction again.

Now the confession took on a different shape. So Wulfstan’s friend had given him what he wanted, and he had killed him for it anyway? To keep him silent? Or to try to scratch the sin out as one might scratch out a word on parchment? To try to make himself innocent again?

The ground was slowly rising beneath them, and the edges of the fields came closer. It was possible to look out and see the mere all around the little island on which they stood. Geese whirred overhead. On the water, small coracles of withies and tarred skins plied busily. Men were fishing, hunting ducks, spearing eels with long three-bladed spears designed for the purpose.

Ahead of them, something dark drew an unnatural line across the water to a far larger land on the other side. Even from here, Leofgar could see the town that wreathed the end of the causeway in smoke.

They would stay there tonight, resting well for the first time in weeks. The two of them would share bedding for warmth and companionship in the hospital run by the brides of God. At the thought, a heat writhed in Leofgar’s belly like a clutch of mating adders.