Éire’s Captive Moon (6 page)

“What?” Agnarr gasped, uncaring that he appeared as dumbfounded as he was.

“I’m asking him his name,” the leader said, sounding annoyed. “Latin. If you don’t speak it, you’ll have to find a translator.”

But, Agnarr had to wonder, how trustworthy would a captive translator be?

He didn’t follow the conversation, but while he was listening, he found another pair of men, both with the circular hairless spot on top of their heads that most of the other men wore. He made a note of the hostility in the dark-haired member of the pair, and the wistful look in the lighter, younger one.

“Cowan,” Tuirgeis said under his breath. “This one is a king’s son!”

Agnarr grinned fiercely at the blond captive. “Ransom!”

The dark head nodded once, abruptly. “Indeed. But he could also be a valued translator, you see?”

“Yes, I do.” After studying the king’s son—the rank explained the young man’s superior attitude and spirit—Agnarr asked for and received permission to interrogate the other pair of prisoners.

Winding through the crying and bleeding men, Agnarr paid them no heed. His focus was on the two men he was going to talk to, if he could. He would need someone who could teach him this Latin, apparently, or who would learn his own tongue.

“What’s your name?” he asked the older, darker man he’d come to see.

A quizzical expression met the question and Agnarr tried again, pointing at himself. “Agnarr Halvardson,” he said, speaking extremely slowly, as if to a very young child. Then he pointed to the dark man with the permanent scowl.

The man rose awkwardly, cradling his right arm in his left hand. “Bran,” was the clear syllable that came from his mouth.

“Bran.” Agnarr nodded. Then he pointed to the younger, red-haired man. “He is . . .?”

Bran pulled up the somewhat vacant-eyed fellow.

“Colum.” And there followed a stream of meaningless sounds that Agnarr cut off with a brusque gesture.

“Bran. Colum.” Agnarr looked them over. Their teeth were sound and well-set in their jaws. Aside from Bran’s dripping wound, their arms were sound. As he moved to examine their legs, however, Agnarr was surprised again.

Bran’s left thigh had sustained a serious wound at some point, for there was a puckered scar that appeared to run deep as well as long. Yet, earlier and now, the man had not favored this leg in the least. That spoke of skilled healing, and Agnarr immediately wanted to know who among the men here had cared for this man. He had to have him as a personal healer, because such talent should not go to waste. Nor did he wish to sell the person who could work this well.

“Who did this?”

The man said something that sounded like complete gibberish, and looked as if he’d actually spit, but Bran apparently thought better of that. Agnarr shook his head and looked to his own leader.

“Tuirgeis! I could use a translator!”

The leader of the raid, and the only man unscathed by the day’s fighting, grinned across the dirt expanse and signaled that he would be there shortly. In the meanwhile, Agnarr tried again to elicit comprehensible information, if that were possible.

He looked closely at the scar and saw the vague nodules that indicated Bran had been stitched together. Agnarr straightened and spoke again. “Who fixed this?” he said, his hands making motions like someone poking a needle through fabric.

The captive did spit this time, looking as if he’d bitten into a particularly rotten piece of raw fish. “
Cailleach
!”

The word might have been unintelligible, but the expression told the
Ostman
that whoever had sewn up Bran had not been appreciated. It made him wonder, and it made him smile.

Tuirgeis tried his Latin on the men, but they seemed quite confused, so he turned and beckoned to the king’s son with an imperative gesture. The potentially ransomable captive seemed about to refuse, but he didn’t. Instead, he helped his companion to sit comfortably and then made a direct path to where Agnarr and Tuirgeis waited.

Agnarr decided he definitely had to learn some Latin while listening to Tuirgeis enlist the king’s son’s help. Tuirgeis also gave a running translation.

“Who are you?”

“I am Bran,” the dark one said. “This is my cousin.”

“I understood that much,” Agnarr murmured while Cowan, the king’s son, continued to translate.

“Who healed you?” Tuirgeis inquired through Cowan.

“She is a witch,” the dark man said, and Agnarr understood the word this time. Bran called the skilled healer a witch?

“Why is she a witch?” he asked. “Did she use spells or call upon her gods?”

“She was not blessed by the monks,” Bran said. “Her healing was evil, and I left as soon as I could!”

Such venom took Agnarr aback. “She is here, then?”

“Here? No! She is in the village, there,” came the bitter reply, accompanied by the wave of an arm. Back to the village that had been so noisy. Was this why he had felt drawn to that place earlier? Because there was a gifted healer there? He didn’t know why a man’s life was spun the way it was, but he did believe there was a reason for such an unexpected interest.

Agnarr pulled the leader aside. “I want to go there, Tuirgeis. It is fated.”

Tuirgeis’s brown brows rose in amused surprise. “I heard no thunder. Has Thor spoken?”

“Just a sense of things I have,” Agnarr replied. “Like the warning you sometimes get on the back of your neck.”

At that Tuirgeis lost the humorous gleam in his eye. “Well, then. Would you like to take a small party to the village while we march the slaves to the boats?”

It was an outstanding opportunity, bespeaking trust and a belief in Agnarr’s instincts. He immediately nodded and straightened his shoulders. “I would. But,” he turned to Cowan, “how will I know this healer? Is she the local wise woman?”

Tuirgeis translated that into Latin and Cowan put the question to the other two captives. Cowan actually looked amused when he heard the responses, for both of the men answered. The dark one was just as vituperative in his reply, but the fairer one seemed almost . . . entranced.

Perhaps, Agnarr thought, the healer had truly been a witch. “What’s so funny?” he inquired of Cowan.

“Well,” translated Tuirgeis, “apparently the young one, Colum, thinks highly of your ‘witch.’ He says she’s like a moonbeam in the fog. Pale and shining. Not old, he told me. She’s young.” Tuirgeis let free a low chuckle. “And this is your fate, Agnarr? What of Elsdottir?”

Agnarr laughed off his leader’s implication, for his betrothal to Magda Elsdottir was of long standing. “I’m interested in a healer, Tuirgeis. That’s all.”

“A moonbeam healer?”

“Who can heal a deep muscle wound so that no damage is evident, yes!”

More serious, Tuirgeis nodded. “A prize indeed. You may go as soon as you gather your men. Choose well; any but my own company.”

Agnarr was going to go, but turned back to the captive interpreter. “Does this moonbeam healer have a name, Kingson?”

Cowan asked and then nodded. “Her name is Charis, lord. And she is wed to the battlechiefs of her people, Colum says.”

Agnarr noted that and went in search of handpicked men to take with him. He had a healer to capture.

Chapter 4

“They just needed a translator, Martin. I think it would be wise to cooperate just now.”

Cowan settled himself again next to Martin and tried to think how to treat the priest’s mangled forearm. The monks had had no chance, Cowan remembered. He was seething inside over the piled desecration before him that the Northmen had amassed.

Jeweled leather covers from carefully copied codices. He had worked on some illuminated manuscripts himself in Tours, and knew how much ink and sweat went into these translations of Ovid and Virgil, as well as the Blessed Saint Patrick’s work. And there were the holy chalices, made of gold, silver, and copper. Costly silver candlesticks were shining far too cheerfully in the sunlight. A small pile of rings, too, glittered in the sun.

Martin’s eyes had tears in them, and not because of his wound. “It’s a tragedy,” he rasped. “How can they do that? Did you see the work?” With a jerky motion of his head, the priest indicated the pile of paper that one of the barbarians was putting to the torch. “Look at that,” Martin hissed. “All of that, up in flames. Oh, that our Lord would return and smite them!”

Cowan was indeed concerned over the codices, but he was more appalled by the ranks of men who would be enslaved by these heathens. Already, there was a “culling” process underway.

The leader, the man who spoke Latin with a harsh accent, was going from man to man, starting with the ranks of those nearest to the granite wall of the monastery.

“Lord, be with them,” Cowan begged in a whisper. “Keep their faith strong, and their bodies hardy. May they find their way home.”

“Home?” Martin gasped. “You think these—these men will let any of us live? Look what they’ve done to our work!”

Although Martin had not illuminated any of the desecrated codices himself, he identified closely with those who had. His face was drawn with anguish, eyes dark, and his hands were visibly trembling. Cowan pitied his friend. Martin’s whole life revolved around monasteries: the men, the work, the manuscripts, the prayer services. Even the times of silence and fasting appealed deeply to Martin’s personality.

Cowan, though, was thinking more broadly.

“I have to get out of here and get to my father,” he decided, clenching his fists and pounding one on the ground for emphasis. “He must be warned. They’ll strike farther inland if they get what they want here. Don’t you think so?” His earliest studies had not been in Latin or scribing. Those first lessons had been in
warfare
, and they had been learned at his father’s side.

The behavior of the enemy was of great import when a battlechief was waging war.

Martin slapped at him with his good hand. “Listen, my brother. You would do better here. The brethren need your gift with tongues. You also have the advantage of having some value to the barbarians. Did you see the way the leader and the braided man regarded you? Did you notice how they spoke to you?”

Cowan shook his head; his focus had been elsewhere. “They’ve not been harsh with me, that’s all I can say.”

A rough, guttural grunt interrupted them and Cowan flinched. He knew that sound; he’d heard it often enough as a boy. It was the sound of a man being put to death. A brave man, not a coward who went out screaming.

“Christ above, help us!” Martin shouted, rising to his feet and making as if to stop the slaughter.

“Sit down, man. Do you want to be next?” Cowan tugged sharply on Martin’s tunic. The image of their morning bath in the sea was suddenly vivid in his mind. Had it only been that morning? It seemed a week had passed since then. Cowan forced Martin to collapse again on the blood-spattered earth.

Some of the monks were deemed too wounded to be enslaved. They were slaughtered out of hand. Others of the holy men had taken a fierce stance, when given the opportunity, in defending the monastery’s treasures.

They paid the ultimate price with peace on their faces and axes in their skulls.

Cowan was torn between pride in the monks and nausea at the manner of their deaths.

A commotion arose among a group of about ten men who were gathering at the broken gate. The braided man—the one called Agnarr—was pointing east, toward the sea. Were they leaving?

The hope that leapt within him was quickly dashed.

“
Tu!” You.

The command came from the leader of the smaller group, the one who had called for him earlier to be a translator. Cowan almost didn’t notice that the command had come in Latin, but when he did recognize that fact, he was astonished. Had the other already begun learning the
lingua gente
of the civilized world? The second son of King Branieucc was unwillingly impressed.

The command rang again, the terse word bouncing off stone walls. Cowan rose slowly to his feet. If he were to leave the encircling walls, he might find a way to escape to his father and then he would bring back a fighting force to overwhelm these vikingr, as they were called in the Aquitaine.

“Cowan!” Martin asked, slapping his bare leg with the back of his uninjured hand. “What are you about?”

“Survival,” Cowan rasped, “and escape if I can. I’ll see you freed, my friend. Have faith and remember Christ in all your dealings with these men. He himself accepted torture at the hands of the Romans and did not retaliate.”

With that needed caution and a most direct glare at the newly impetuous Frankish monk, Cowan wiped the dust from his tunic and approached Agnarr with measured steps. “Yes?” Wait, what was the word he had heard for an affirmative? “
Ja
?”

Agnarr’s dark blond brows twitched in surprise before a slow smile slanted his mouth. Using words that made no sense to the man of Éire, the invader gestured that he, Cowan, should accompany him.

“Wait!” Cowan said with what he hoped was a firm and respectful tone. “What about my friend?” He used gestures and hoped to convey that he wished Martin to be treated and cared for.

The
vikingr
made a noncommittal sort of sound and Cowan had to let it stand; he had tried. He muttered a prayer as he allowed himself to be bound by the wrists.
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for You are with me.