Brothers of the Wild North Sea Read Online Free

Here, though, in the pure sweet air, the gesture had been stripped of shame for him. He bowed his head and waited for his abbot’s benediction.
    “Blessed be the travellers who come safely home,” Theo pronounced, resting his hands on their skulls.
    “Praise be to God,” they chorused back. They had all three switched into Church Latin, their only common tongue, Leof and Cai dropping the homely dialect of the northern shores. The transition was a reflex for Cai by now. He’d struggled at first, but a two-year immersion in the language of Bible and churchmen the world over had had its effect, and he’d discovered to his surprise that Broccus had prepared his mind for some of it, with the bawdy old chants handed down to him from his Roman forebears.
    The benediction over, Theodosius ruffled their hair, first Cai’s dark mop and then Leof’s fair one. “I should tonsure you,” he said worriedly. “I know I should. You two and all the others.”
    Cai smiled up at him, pushing to his feet. He’d gathered from his trading trips that certain aspects of monastic life were different here than in other communities. There were no astronomy lessons for the brotherhoods down south—why should there be, when God had fixed the Earth at the centre of creation, leaving nothing new to know?—and Cai had learned to raise his hood when dealing with the monks of Tyne, or risk a storm of disapprobation for his unshorn head.
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said, setting off with Leof and Theo up the steps. “Don’t you think there ought to be some kind of dispensation? For brethren like ourselves, I mean, who tend the fires of faith this far to the north. After all, the bulk of our bodies’ heat loss occurs through the top of the skull, I’ve observed.”
    “Does it?” Theo glanced over at him, dark eyes gleaming. The scientist in him would defeat the churchman every time, as Cai had also observed. “Have you?”
    “I have. When Brother Petros got caught out in the snowdrifts with the sheep, a rabbit skin on the top of his head did him more good than all our clothes and blankets. Even than the fire.”
    “Is it so? Well, you may have a point. Enough to let me put off the evil day, anyhow—I don’t quite understand why our bald pates are pleasing in the sight of God.”
    “Because, my lord abbot,” Leof offered shyly, “he doesn’t wish us to be covered up from him.”
    “Why, Leof, you sound as if he told you so himself. No. It’s simply a sign of our renunciation of the world and its vainglory.”
    “In that case, I should like it to be done.” Leof cast a wistful glance at Cai, as if he might like the hair he’d run his fingers through in worldly, vainglorious pleasure to be left well alone. “To me, at any rate.”
    “Then so it shall be, child—as soon as I get my shears back from Brother Petros. Caius, you’ve arrived home in good time. Did Leof tell you my first chapter is complete?”
    “No, my lord abbot.” We’ve been a little busy. Cai pushed the thought away from him. “But that’s good news. Did you decide yet on a title?”
    “Yes.” They had reached a turning in the long stone flight. Theo took up position on a flat rock and spread his arms as if to address the sunny infinity of moorlands and dunes that lay before him. “Poor copy though it is, I shall call it the Gospel of Science .”
    Leof flinched. Like all the brethren of Fara, he loved and feared Theo in equal measure. He would never contradict him, but Cai had observed how he’d sit in Theo’s lectures, head bowed, his hands clasped in his lap, as if silently begging God to overlook the blasphemy one more time. Well—good and conventional churchmen did not get appointed to world’s-edge outposts like Fara, and Theo had not been so much sent as banished there. He was a renegade, a once-powerful teacher caught in the rebellious possession of books now deemed heretical by the Roman Church. Stripped of his treasured