The Reluctant Berserker (32 page)

Wulfstan startled at the intimacy and gave him the same wondering, unconvinced look with which he had received the kiss in the courtyard. Clearly he did not know what to make of this sudden conversion. Leofgar lost the second half of the service altogether under imaginings of how he would prove his change of heart as soon as he could get Wulfstan alone. God did not strike him down either for inattentiveness or for lust. So he felt he had tacit permission to go on, and go on he did.

When the service ended, the monks and nuns filing out took guests and onlookers alike with them. The abbess, a slim, shrouded figure, rose from her gilded throne, and she and her ladies passed through the further door into a small room beyond. Gewis and his carpenters came out of hiding, and in the echoing emptiness left behind, they coupled together the organ with rapid competent ease.

“That went well,” Leofgar said, surprised, when Gewis at last sat down in front of the instrument, and the boy pumped the bellows enough to get a note from each pipe. Such notes too, making the air shake in his lungs and the ground vibrate beneath him. Harsh, strident, bellowing notes, like great cymbals crashing. They punched him in the chest and grabbed his throat and shook him like the hands of giants.

“We have practiced this so often I have dreamed of it going together, piece by piece, every night this past fortnight.” Gewis’s eyes were white rimmed with excitement, and there was a frantic note to his smile. The look he directed at Wulfstan seemed as though it would have been curious if it had not been held under and drowned in the larger glory of finally having the voice of God at his fingertips.

Leofgar knew exactly how he felt—the sound of the organ enraptured him. He thought of his song for Anna, and the fierce passages where he had tried to convey the magnificence of that man’s soul—the blinding ferocity of its light—through the poor thin notes at the top of the harp, the squeaky shrill of an overblown whistle.

Before he had formed his thoughts into words, Lark was in his hands. At the sight of the harp, Gewis sat down gently on the six-legged stool before the organ. His expression of triumph softened with memories as he reached out and traced the well-worn carving down her throat.

“Our master carried this. Anna’s master and mine. I had almost forgotten.”

Leofgar laid his cheek to her arch protectively, but forced himself to say, “You would make a claim to her?”

“No,” Gewis laughed, though it was a melancholy sound. “I have now this beast for my own. You are the last of our line to tread the gleeman’s path. It is right she should be yours. Why bring her out now?”

“I made a song for Anna. Listen.”

Despite what must have been an overweening desire to finally play his new instrument, Gewis fidgeted only two measures at the beginning of Leofgar’s refrain. By the time he came to the triumphant notes, plucked high and shrill from the smallest strings, Gewis was leaning forward, listening intently. That musician’s part of Leofgar that stretched out to a fellow scop and linked them so that the song could flow back and forth reached out now to Gewis’s listening heart. It rejoiced when the old man frowned hard to fix the notes in his memory then turned and laid his hands on the keys.

The carpenter and his boy had both disappeared, but Wulfstan seized the bellows instead and worked them smooth and strong.

Leofgar closed his eyes and played sorrow, sad and sweet, that turned into gratitude, that turned into…

Joy thundered in the roof and broke Leofgar’s heart apart, hearing the sound he had never thought to hear in waking life. They played together, Anna’s friend and his pupil, and the first song the great organ of Ely abbey ever gave tongue to was his own music, his master’s elegy, his greatest work.

When it finished, he had to wipe away the tears that were snaking down Lark’s soundbox. And it was because he was exalted on heavenly music and dazzled with sunshine on tears that he did not recognise the three men who had opened the church door and stepped inside. Not, at least, until Wulfstan unpicked the peace-ties around his sword and drew, and Gewis rose and recoiled from the blasphemy with a shout.

Leofgar had barely time to look up before Wulfstan had pushed him behind himself. When he did, he saw Hunlaf and Deala, standing shoulder to shoulder between Leofgar and the way out.

Gewis picked up his robes and went running to the door through which the abbess had vanished. With numb hands and galloping heart, Leofgar put Lark down carefully between the organ and the wall, where she would be neither knocked over nor stood on by accident.

He stood and brushed himself down to be sure he was neat—why die slovenly, after all? Despite Wulfstan’s gestures that told him to run, despite the remembered feeling of helplessness that made his lips and his fingertips cold, he forced himself to walk forward and look steadily up into the face of the third man, his lord, Tatwine.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Leofgar’s body betrayed him as he came up beside Wulfstan. He could feel even now the press of Tatwine’s weight on his back. The skin of his flanks burned with remembered touches. His breath came thin and fast. He smoothed it down as he had smoothed down his skirts, tipped up his chin so that Tatwine would see he was not cowed—such a practiced liar he was—and said, “Wulfstan, this does not need to be solved with steel. Not here in the sanctuary of peace.”

Hunlaf’s gaze was cold as a dragon’s but, at the words, his hands gave off picking at the knot of his own peace-ties. Deala had taken his bow off his back, but now he set one end down on the tiles, unbent, and wound the slack string around his fingers.

Tatwine stepped forward, his hair glinting like steel on the breadth of his shoulders, and all the silver ornaments of belt and baldrick gleaming alike.

At the movement, Leofgar retreated three steps, back towards the altar. He should have run to it, should have had his hands on it before opening this altercation. He should have claimed sanctuary before acknowledging the three of them, giving them power over him.

He had not done so. And if he broke and ran for it now, Hunlaf at least would follow, grab him by the belt and lift him off his feet, like as not. Leofgar would wait a long time before he provoked such a scene in a place like this—a place that had the trembling echoes of glory lodged in its stones.

“My lord,” he said instead, calmly enough, without either the accusation that would have pleased him or the apology that would have pleased Tatwine.

“You keep calling me that.” Tatwine laid a hand on Wulfstan’s wrist, pushing down. Wulfstan hesitated long enough to show he did this of his own will, not forced, and slid his weapon back into the scabbard. The threat of bloodshed eased. “I don’t think you mean it. You have a strange way of keeping your oaths, scop.”

“There are things no man can command of another, lord or not.” Leofgar was proud of his voice—not a hint of shake or fear, only certainty and righteousness. A weak-minded man would doubt himself at the rock-solid strength of Leofgar’s certainty.

Tatwine only smiled and smoothed down the ends of his moustache with finger and thumb. “Is that so? Yet I do not remember you setting conditions to your obedience at the time.”

“Some things do not need to be said.” Some things indeed could only be said in secret, for surely Tatwine did not mean to openly discuss this in front of Wulfstan, who was a stranger to him. In front of whoever else might wander in from the busy town outside to pay homage at the shrine. In front of the saint herself, whose bones lay beneath their feet.

Perhaps Tatwine caught this thought by watching it swim in the back of Leofgar’s widened eyes, for he gave a snort of laughter and stepped back, looking up to admire the painted angels on the ceiling and the bright, fresh colours on the new assembled organ. Reaching out, he set an inquisitive hand on one of the keys, produced only a wheeze of wind, not strong enough to make the pipe speak. His face changed from hard humour to curiosity at the sound.

“We heard the song from outside. It’s how we knew we had finally run you to ground.” A sober look from his pale eyes. “We had heard that song before, the night we were attacked by outlaws. Deala tells me he shot at many who were already running away. Hunlaf says the men he fought were more afraid of the shadows than they were of him—that half their minds were mazed in horrors, walking in the forest, and their hands were clumsy because of it and their backs left open.”

He pulled out the six-legged stool and sat, propping his sword on his knee like any king drawn in red ink and bedecked with gold in a manuscript. “After we cut the last of them down, we found bodies in the woods around, not slain by our steel. When I returned to my camp, I found my two hostages gone.”

Tatwine dropped a hand onto Lark’s pillar, where she lay in her careful spot beside the organ, and Leofgar started forward altogether against his own will. Tatwine nodded as though he had just confirmed everything he had thought.

“My two hostages which I see are now back with their master. You did not simply shout to warn us, did you? You woke us and you defended us. You drove those wolfsheads away, and thereby saved our lives, did you not?”

For some reason he had not expected Tatwine to put it with such generosity.
Sneaked back and stole from me
, Leofgar had expected.
Saved our lives
, though that was indeed what he’d done, he had thought would be too painful for the warriors to admit.

“I did. Wulfstan and I both.”

Tatwine looked Wulfstan up and down—there was a great deal of up, for Wulfstan stood like a pillar with his head high and his great shoulders braced. His hair looked brown, outside the sunlight, its embers invisible for now, waiting to be called forth glowing by sunlight or candle. “Wulfstan, son of Wulfric of Colneceastre? I know your brother Herewulf. He commanded one of my ships when I delivered them into the king’s fleet for the shipscot of us both. A stern man and silent.”

Wulfstan looked awkward at this introduction. His back bent a little and straightened again, as though the thought of his family was a weight on his neck. “He is the eldest,” he said, “and so has little time for mirth.”

Tatwine had turned the church into his hall, Leofgar thought, watching him lounge on the stool as if it were his own high seat. Now he was looking between Wulfstan and Leofgar with an air of understanding and a bitter cast to his mouth. Leofgar ran the past month through his fingers as if feeling for wear, brought to mind the first time Tatwine had seen Wulfstan—running out of the hospital in Cotanham to protect Leofgar, being ridden down in the process, yet coming back that very night to snatch him from under Tatwine’s plundering hands.

There was a story in that. Not the true story, but a story that would fit everyone’s beliefs better—a story that would bring honour to all, except the storyteller himself. But it was not the storyteller’s place to demand to be among the heroes. His place was to guide the threads, unseen, like Wyrd herself.

But what a huge lie to tell in the house of God!

With Tatwine’s eyes upon him, the warriors between him and the door, with Wulfstan radiating readiness to do battle, Leofgar put out his left hand and slipped it into Wulfstan’s right.

Wulfstan jumped, taken by surprise, but his grip tightened and he gave a look so proud, so melting sweet that Leofgar thought no words would be needed after all. Understanding dawned clear on Tatwine’s face.

“So you two are…?”

“We met two years ago in Uisebec.” Leofgar squeezed Wulfstan’s hand tight to tell him to keep silent. “He offered me his protection and I was too proud to take it.” That at least should ring true. “All the year after, I regretted my stubbornness, and so when we were both there again this year I pledged myself to him.”

“Then why—”

“How could I leave my master, who had brought me up from childhood?” The ring of truth in that too—let Tatwine hear it and suppose it chimed over all.

“When Anna wanted to come north, of course I had to come with him. When he found, in you, the kind lord he had dreamed of all his life, how could I dash that hope out of his hand when he was dying? So I gave you my allegiance. I could not give you my heart, for it had already been taken. If I had been free…”
I would have run as though the devil was behind me.
“But I was not, and I would not be foresworn.”

Some freak of poetry moved Wulfstan, unrehearsed but perfect. He leaned around Tatwine, gently lifted Lark from under his palm and passed her to Leofgar, who hugged her tight.

Tatwine’s gaze as it rested on him felt lighter than before, and Leofgar tried not to be angry at the fact that he had to achieve this with lies, when the truth had been so roundly ignored.

“Yet you could have simply told me,” Tatwine said, very quietly, very disappointed. “Why all the rigmarole with hiding and hurting yourself and running away?”

This at least Leofgar could answer with the bite appropriate to a hard truth. “Because in my life it has been a rare thing for any man to believe my words. I have grown used to being ignored and passed from one hand to another, like a communal harp to be made to sing as each man pleased.”

“You didn’t think I would listen.” Tatwine took hold of the ends of his moustache and tugged them, as if that would explain the downturn of his mouth. “Yet you still came back and fought for me, and brought your friend with you? Come here.”

Leofgar made no move. He thought himself tolerably brave, but he had no wish to come within grabbing distance of Tatwine ever again.