The Reluctant Berserker (28 page)

He stepped off the path for a moment, ran up one of the banks until he could see Wulfstan’s face. The man’s anger seemed to have gone, but his normally open expression was cold, his gentle, perplexed eyes gone hard.

Stern resolution looked good on him, just as the rage had done, and Leofgar could not get weakness into the same phrase with that. His strength and his desire to yield? The two notes were discordant with each other. Leofgar could not see any way of looking at them that made them harmonize.

The causeway was a great work, though it did not rival the ruins left by giants in this well-loved country the English called their own. A double row of stout posts had been driven deep into the peaty ground. Thick ropes were secured between them, hanging down in a kind of cradle. Over the ropes, supported by them, high off the water had been lain a trackway of planks end to end. Two planks across, it was wide enough for a man to walk the path without breaking stride—as though he were on a mown lawn or an ancient road.

For horses it was trickier. At the base of the hill, where isle turned back into mere, Leofgar paid off the child and watched him pelt away fast as his short legs would take him.

Wulfstan was still avoiding Leofgar’s eye. Leofgar had to touch him on the elbow to make him look. When he did, there was a moment much like those when—travelling beneath thunderclouds—the wind blows them apart and lets through a startling ray of sunshine, more golden for the dark. His frown eased, and the fullness of his mouth returned like a rose blooming.

“I can lead Fealo.” There were many things Leofgar wanted to say, but they would be better said in the dark, between the two of them alone. “I have done this before, I will show you.”

“You make it sound as though I had never left my burh.” The break in Wulfstan’s clouds thinned and closed, leaving it darker than before. “Just because I said…I do not need your protection or advice.”

Touchy whoreson.

Had he been patronising? Had he lowered his expectations because of Wulfstan’s confession—instinctively begun to treat the man as he would treat a woman? Surely not? “Peace,” he said. “I had thought only that I have traveled much with my master, and you lead a more settled life with your lord. I thought that it might be strange to you.”

“I need no cosseting.”

Sullen, Wulfstan looked more childlike than frightening, and there was a look of falsehood in his doubtful eyes, brown as a peaty stream. It made Leofgar wonder, trained as he was to read the needs and preferences of his audience, though they spoke against them or not at all. What a complicated man his companion was. It must be hard to live with blood that gave your mind the lie.

“I intended none.” He sighed and led the way anyway, glad to put the shadow of Wulfstan’s turmoil behind him, if only for a while.

They slipped and slithered across the damp planks, coaxing the nervous horse all the way, always in danger of sliding off to left or to right and drowning in the bog. By the time they made it onto the firm ground beyond, Leofgar had a shake throughout his whole frame. His limbs felt shaped out of pondweed and slime—slippery, untrustworthy, liable to slide apart at any moment.

Wulfstan avenged himself by taking Leofgar’s arm and holding him up. He hoisted Leofgar into the saddle with all the ease of one who has had a pleasant amble and could now fancy a race. Leofgar rolled the eyes of his mind and allowed it, partly to ease the feeling between them, partly because the help was welcome enough.

The light dimmed, and the sky became an ocean of madder red and weld yellow. Starlings rose from the reeds like a fog, swirled and danced under heaven so thick it seemed the clouds came down to fill the twilight with chatter. The smoke of the town of Alrehethe guided them, and by the time it grew too dark to see it, they could smell the dwellings—the welcome reek of folk—and pick out the red-gold star of the firebasket that hung outside the hospital.

It lit a dozen men, half of them nuns. Clearly none of these ladies had bound themselves to silence. They were speaking shrill and angry with a party of travellers who, by their ribbons, had already been to St. Aethelthryth’s shrine and were now on their way home. When the nuns saw Leofgar and Wulfstan, the foremost flung up her hands in exasperation and made him grin. God had some fierce brides—more outspoken and masterful than many a man would want to wed.

“Oh, and now there are more.” She glared at him as though her trouble was of his making. “Here, this is what I will do. There are no more beds in the hospital, no matter how close you cram. The wives in your party may come in to the nunnery and sleep with the sisters. For the men, you will have to make do with the stables and storehouses. I can do no better than that. Half of you may come into the refectory now and eat, the other half may come in afterwards when we have room to spare and more food cooked.”

Leofgar wondered what Wulfstan would make of being thus hustled about by a woman since he made so much of being talked down to by a man, but Wulfstan seemed perfectly fine with it, going so far as to smile for the first time since the boat trip.

A half loaf and a weak bowl of barley pottage later, they found themselves being guided through the gardens by a fat porter with a torch. Thin drizzle had settled in and hissed through the flames of the torch, settling like seed pearls on every woolen garment. So Leofgar was grateful to be shown the door of a little hut, built off the ground on four large stones and packed with sacks of dry stuff—by the smell it was herbs—and amphorae against the back wall that smelled of no kind of wine.

The porter restacked the sacks to reveal a couple of feet of bare floorboards and cast down there the thin pallet and single blanket he had carried from the hospital store. When he had done this, he sighed and thrust both hands up opposing sleeves, resting his arms on the swell of his belly. “It’s not much, but it’s dry.”

Leofgar waited a beat for Wulfstan to stand on his dignity and speak first, as was his due. Nothing. So he grinned, happily as he could, and said, “After all the nights in ditches, this is a feast-hall. Our thanks.”

“God be with you.” The man squeezed through the door and shut it behind him. In the darkness, they heard his footsteps drawing away. Leofgar laughed, huh, because he was shut up in the dark with a man who had killed his last lover, and he didn’t know whether to be aroused, afraid or faintly sick. Whichever was appropriate, he was all three.

Chapter Nineteen

Wulfstan took off his belt and, crossing his hands over one another, took hold of the bottom of his chain-mail byrnie. Leaning forwards, as though he was trying to touch his toes, he pulled the back of the garment up and allowed its own weight to make it slither all the way off, turning inside out as it did. Groping for the fallen pile of rings, he set it on top of one of the sacks.

It was too dark in here to see Leofgar, but he could hear the other man breathing, feel the warmth that sprang from his skin. At times as he also undressed, Wulfstan would feel an elbow knock his arm, and once the press of a hip as Leofstan unbalanced. Surprising how intimidating that mattress was beneath their feet. Or perhaps not surprising. But he wouldn’t have the scop say of him that he was as cowardly as his desires implied.

“You are still here,” he said, as he knelt down and spread his warm but slightly damp cloak over the blanket. The utter dark smelled like the fabulous east—of thyme and bitter wormwood and poultices brewed from beeswax and vinegar. The reeling reek of it all threatened to make his nose run with stinging sweetness. “I thought you might have found a reason, today, to continue your journey alone.”

“You thought I would leave you?” came the voice in the dark, melodic and expressive. The intonation spoke first of surprise and then indignation. A pause for thought followed. “Huh. Perhaps I should not be so fretted by that. The truth is, I did not know myself until this moment that I would never do that.”

Never.
Wulfstan chuckled to himself in something that was sharper edged than true laughter. There was a strange thought—that Leofgar would never leave. That they would never part. It caused him a pain that hurt so much it was almost pleasant. Or perhaps it was a pleasure so great it had grown into pain.

“When I confessed my desires to my friend,” he said, conscious of Leofgar standing by his side, turning about like a dog trying to get comfortable in a hollow by the fire, “his first thought was to tell everyone. His first desire was to expose me to humiliation and laughter.”

“And you killed him.” Finally the scop found his perfect spot. His cloak came down atop the other covers, and he followed, wriggling under the pile of bedding like an eel into a pot. There was a note of what Wulfstan considered altogether ill-judged humour in his voice. “It is good to piece the puzzle together at last. The guilt, the mother’s curse… The reason you did not kill me.”

I would never!
Wulfstan’s turn to be indignant, but the scop gave him no space to say it, running on with, “Do you think she’s out there still? Your avenger?”

Wulfstan lay down himself on one elbow, turning to face the voice. He had to crowd close, for the bedding was wide enough for only one man. To be warmed by it, they needed to cling to one another in the middle. He felt out, and his exploring hand found the hardness of Leofgar’s ribcage. Trying not to caress, he slid his fingers up the bones and over, pulling the other man to him. The wave of heat that went through him could have had very little to do with the thin cloaks.

“Cenred’s death was an accident.” He wanted to get this clear once and for all. “I was enraged past the point where I could control my own deeds. I think I would have stopped before I killed him, if it were not for an ill-placed blade. I did not kill him on purpose to cover up my weakness, this I am prepared to swear before God. I could have lied, and my word would have been believed over his.”

Leofgar lay in his arms without horror, not even trembling, and though the darkness made it easier to speak, it was the harper’s calm that let him see deep into himself as he did so.

“This is what I cannot…I cannot understand. He was my friend, and for one night my lover. And in the morning he tried to destroy me. Was that not betrayal enough to give me the right to be angry? Was that not vile in him? Yet—if he had spoken—everyone would have looked at us and thought
I
was the despicable one. I trusted him like no one else on earth, and he meant to abuse that trust for his own amusement.”

A touch on Wulfstan’s face resolved into the pressure of long, strong fingers. They wiped the corner of his eye and took away the tear that had stood there.

“I don’t understand how that can be fair.”

Leofgar’s fingers went creeping into his hair, spiderlike, combing it back from his forehead, slipping, sliding through until they came to rest on the nape of his neck and drew a shiver from him. He wanted the other hand to pull aside encumbering clothes and skate down over his skin, wanted Leofgar’s fingers to breach him and play him the way he played that thrice-accursed harp. But this, all of this, the darkness and the long steel and sinew hug, the drowsy sensuality that said
Yes—there will be nothing to regret. Have this for once, what can it harm?
All of this he had experienced before. He knew it lied.

“What I do not understand,” murmured Leofgar, breath on his cheek, “is how you can want what I had rather face outlawry—to live all my days as an outcast—to avoid. I cannot get the memory of it out of my head, and it is not a good one.”

How selfish was Wulfstan that he had not thought of this before? He was not the only one in the bed to have good reason to flee it. Nor was he the only one trying to trust again after betrayal. Strange though it was to think, for all his strength of will, the harper would be no match for Wulfstan if Wulfstan changed his mind, chose to take Leofgar by force. Close together as they were, hot shafts pressed between their bellies, it would take a far more stupid man than Leofgar not to be aware of lust and danger.

“I wanted to tell you what I was,” Wulfstan said. “So you would know you had no need to fear me.”

“You think much of yourself if you suppose I ever did.” The words cracked across his face like a whip strike, narrow and stinging. They made him laugh with delight, turn his head and capture the teasing lips that had been brushing against his cheek. Leofgar stormed in and took possession, greatly aided by the fact that Wulfstan was all too eager to give it away.

“Mmm,” he purred, agreeing with everything and anything that would make the kiss go on. But Leofgar flicked him hard in the corner of the mouth with his fingernail and made him break away.

“I should tell you that you also have no reason to fear me,” the harper said. “I do not understand your desire. In truth it disturbs me that one such as you should wish for such a thing. Still I owe you more than my life, and I have no wish to bring you shame. I will not denounce nor condemn you. Not even in my heart.”

Sweet but bitter were these words to Wulfstan. At the acceptance in them, he felt a joy mingled with relief. Though Leofgar lied freely in the course of his work, it did not occur to Wulfstan to disbelieve him. His instincts, had he listened to them, had told him all along not to trust Cenred; they said nothing of the sort to him about Leofgar.

About Leofgar they said,
Here, here is the one you’ve been waiting for. Keep him close, and if he will not stay with you, go with him.
They said this through an ache in the chest and loins, and through his skin, which yearned towards Leofgar’s touch like a dry man for a long drink. Through the long winter, they had said it through his dreams, and the idle way his mind turned back to the harper, despite every reason to flinch.