Brothers of the Wild North Sea

Who could be like him? Who could ever be like you? Each of us has his path. They run close together sometimes—for life, if we are fortunate—but they never cross.

Winter passed, suns and moons, and in the heat of summer each tree leaned across the stream and enmeshed its young foliage with the crown of its brother. More summers, more winters, more suns and moons, and the two had grown together, their great trunks fused, the stream parting now to flow round them.

Only a plain wooden cross stood at the head of each pile of earth. Identity was unimportant—each of these men, coming to monastic life, had cast off all selfhood, subsumed who he was in the greater brotherhood of Christ. That was the theory, anyway. It didn’t quite work out in life. Wulfhere had sung like an angel. Andreou had been a fat gossip who had loved Theo more than God. Aethelstan’s booming laugh had carried out over the noise of his forge, and Petros had made wooden bowls of such exquisite finish that matrons scrapped over them like cats in the village market. And Leof… In death, the theory worked well. Only Cai and his brethren knew which grave was which, and with them would vanish the knowledge that Leof lay closest to the wall, sheltered by hawthorns, cradled in the sacred ground he had loved.

He could feel the revolutions of the Earth. He wasn’t meant to, he was sure. The vastness of the rock, and the great invisible force that pinned him to it, meant he could spend his days in blissful unawareness of moving at all. Such an illusion was every man’s right, Theo had taught. Learning could be taken or rejected. But the choice had to be there.

Ergot—the punishment of holy fire!” Cai released a breath of irritation. He wiped his hands on a cloth and stepped into the middle of the barn. “There’s nothing holy about it. And it’s a fungus, not a punishment.” “Holy fire!” Godric shouted again, making Cai wonder if he’d been at the infected grain already. “And milk that will not churn. And Friswide’s hens have stopped laying, and last night my hearth burned with a cold green flame. Perhaps there is a witch!

Beyond all of those places, here they would be. He pressed tighter into Fen's embrace. This place had forever in it. Time couldn't end it, nor even the limits of life. Not distance—not even the wastes of the wild North Sea.

Around them, sky and air wove the ancient song of the meeting place of earth and sea—wave-rush on the shore, gulls mewing and sobbing. No more bells, except a last dying peal from Fara.