A Song for Arbonne (61 page)

She didn't know what to do. That was the worst of it. She could pray, gather everyone on the island under the temple dome to offer hymns and incantations all day and night, seeking some access to the goddess, invoking her intercession. Rian could not be compelled, though. That was the oldest, deepest law; she was capricious and inviolate, and death was a part of her dominion—it was, in fact, one of her incarnations. She was mother, she was bride, but she was also gatherer of the dead.

It might even be that Rian herself had ordained this scourge as a punishment, a cleansing of the evils of their time. Beatritz didn't know what their great acts of evil might be, but she was only a servant of the goddess, not privy to divine awareness. She would have thought—she would have said—that there was no darkness or evil in Arbonne deserving of what had happened to the corans in that watch-tower below the High Pass last autumn, or to the priestesses of the temple of Aubry that same night.

She would have said as much to holy Rian herself. As if it would matter. The owl ruffled his feathers, bringing her mind back. She'd been considering options, responses. She remembered how her father used to do that, crisply running through possibilities aloud before decisively choosing his path. It was still difficult for her sometimes to accept that he was dead, that the burdens were her mother's now and her own, with such aid as could be invoked from the bitterly divided nobility of Arbonne.

There was no heir. That had always been a problem, and Guibor IV of Barbentain had been unable to name one in his last years for fear of tearing the country apart. He had even tried to make Beatritz leave the sanctuary of the goddess in the year after Aelis died with her child in Miraval. Guibor had anticipated this trouble in the time that followed the death of his youngest child. He had always anticipated a great deal, it was a fault of his, to try to make too many things fall right at the same time. It had been that way with Aelis's marriage to Urté de Miraval in the first place: a powerful duke, one of the mightiest in the country, a choice that could not be impeached, and a man anxious to father children, a son or even a daughter to rule Arbonne when Guibor died.

But Aelis had died first, and so too, almost certainly, had her son. No one could be absolutely sure, though everyone knew what she had told her husband on her deathbed about the fathering of the child: in doing so she had given dreadful, calamitous life to the feud that had shaped Arbonne ever since. Urté could not even be approached or spoken to on this issue. Beatritz had tried once, at the end of the year after Aelis died—and had received the most stinging rebuke of her life. They would have had to put the duke of Miraval to torture to even try to make him speak. And he wouldn't have, they all knew that: he wouldn't have said what had happened to the child even then.

Not even Guibor the count had been able to quell or control what Aelis had begun between Talair and Miraval on that night so long ago. So, searching for alternatives, he had tried to make Beatritz leave the clergy, come back to Barbentain, prepare herself to marry, to have a child of her own.

It was then that she'd had herself blinded, in that small temple in the Gotzland mountains, taking the step no priestess had taken for years upon years, aligning herself irrevocably with Rian. She had become High Priestess two years later and had come to the island.

Her father had never truly forgiven her. That had always hurt, for she had loved him. Not as her mother did, with an undying passion of the soul, and not even as her sister Aelis had, with something complex and yearning at its core. Beatritz had known her father's weaknesses and his flaws too well, had seen him too clearly for either of those kinds of love: she understood his pride, how he wished to control and shape far too much in too many different ways, his own guiding hands on the reins of everyone and everything. Of course she understood such a thing: it was her own besetting vice. She was Guibor's child. Her call to Rian had been real, though, the truest thing in her life, and she had known it young.

Her mother had understood, surprisingly. Signe, beautiful and glittering like an ornamental jewel under torchlight in Barbentain, seemed nonetheless to have understood a great deal, always. Beatritz ached for her tonight, picturing her in the wintry castle with these brutal tidings newly come and the terrible, crushing knowledge that she might be the ruler of Arbonne in the time it died forever.

The owl grew restive again, a motion of admonition. Options. She had been considering her options. She could start north herself, leaving the island and the seat of any power or foreknowledge she might be given, to lend her purely mortal strength, what wisdom she had, to her mother and those who would be with the countess now.

They didn't need her, she realized with a gnawing helplessness. She had counsels to offer in times of peace or preparation, of smaller and larger intrigues, the tidings her own network of informants might gather, but what did she know about waging war?

It was, she told herself with bitterness, time for the men now. The irony was coruscating. Arbonne was to be destroyed because of its women, because of the goddess who shared in their love and devotion with Corannos in the sky, because it was ruled by a woman now, because of the symbols and the music of the Court of Love and the examples of grace set by figures like Signe and Ariane. And yet now that ruin had come to them with sword and axe and carried brand, now that images of rape and fire would dance behind the closed eyelids of every woman in Arbonne, it was the men who would have to save them after all.

And despite more than twenty years of her father's striving before he died, and then her mother's afterwards, despite patience and wiles and even Guibor's attempts at absolute commands, the two most powerful men in Arbonne still hated each other with a ferocity, with a savage, time-locked obsession that had never let them go, and would never do so, never let them act together, even to save themselves and their land.

Beatritz knew this. She knew it with a despair that almost overwhelmed her.
This
had always been the weakness at the heart of Arbonne in their time, the thing that left them wide open to destruction. Not the fact of a woman ruling them. Not the rumoured softness of their corans; that was false and manifestly so. Not the corrupting influence of the troubadours and their music; there was no corruption in the flourish of that art. Their danger, their crippling wound, was Talair and Miraval.

Her sister Aelis, Beatritz thought, with an old, unrelenting bitterness, had much to answer for.

It was an unfair thought, she supposed. Her mother had told her as much, over and again through the years. Unfair or not, it was there, she was thinking it, she would think it until she died, and she would die remembering Aelis, dark and slender, far too proud, with her will like forged iron and that unwillingness, ever, to forgive.

Like Bertran, that last quality, Beatritz thought. Like Urté. And then a newer thought, as she reached up again to gentle her restive owl:
Like me.

"Oh, Aelis," she murmured aloud. "Oh, sister, did we all begin to die the night you died, with or without the child?"

It was possible, she thought. There were ripples to events, and they went a long way sometimes across the dark pools of time and the world.

Brissel shifted on her shoulder again and then suddenly flexed his sharp talons in a way she knew. It was always like this: without any warning at all the presence of the goddess might come to her. Catching her breath, feeling the familiar speeding up of her pulse, Beatritz waited, and was answered, assuaged, with images in her darkness, images swirling to take shape as out of some primal fog before the world was made.

She saw two castles and recognized them immediately. Miraval and Talair—she had known those proud, twinned assertions all her life. Another image quickly: an arch, immeasurably old, massive, humbling, carvings of war and conquest stamped upon it like foreshadowing from long ago. And then, as she released her breath in a spasm of love and pain she could not quite hold in, the High Priestess of Rian saw a lake in her mind, a small, delicate isle in the midst of it, three plumes of smoke rising straight as swords into the windless winter sky. The last thing she saw was a tree. Then the images were gone and she was left with only darkness again, and Brissel on her shoulder.

It came like this, and it went, never coerced, never subject to entreaty. The goddess remembered her children sometimes and sometimes she forgot them in the caprice of her nature. She could shower gifts like blessed rain in spring, or she could turn her back and let ice and fire have their way. She had a face of laughter and one of desire, a countenance of true compassion and a terrible visage of judgment. In the teachings of Arbonne it was Corannos the god who was kinder, more soberly caring for men and women. Rian suffered them, and loved them, but she could be cruel as nature was cruel. It was the god who held their mortal children always in mind, who did not fail to see their sufferings upon the earth. So it had been taught in Arbonne for generations.

The teachings were different elsewhere. They were very different in Gorhaut.

She was going to have to stay here, Beatritz understood. Only on the island could she have access to any such precognitions as this one. A message would have to go to Barbentain tonight. She would ask the two young troubadours who were wintering with them here. They would not deny her; these were not men to hide in the sea when death and ruin were coming down from the north. She would send them to the countess, warning her, telling them all where the culmination was to be.

It would be in the place of this vision, she was being told: by that small isle in Lake Dierne, by the arch, the two castles, it would end there.

Of course,
she thought, aware of an inner stillness in the aftermath of the presence of Rian. Of course it will be there. She felt the nudge of an old sorrow.
I should have known. That is where it began.

She was wise and no longer young, Beatritz de Barbentain, deeply conversant with the ways of power in the world, and long since accustomed to her darkness and the occasional gateways to knowledge it gave her. She was, in fact, more privy to the paths of Rian than she allowed herself to acknowledge, for she had always wanted more than she had. It was the nature of her family, the legacy of her blood. Still, the goddess had never yet abandoned her entirely, however long the intervals might be. She knew a great deal, having been granted, at moments such as this, clear, sharp visions through rifts in time hidden from all the other living children of Corannos and Rian.

On the other hand, there were things even the High Priestess on her island did not know and had never known, whether of future or present or the widening ripples of the shaping past. Nor would it have been proper if she had. Oaths sworn to the dying were sacrosanct in Arbonne.

When they come down at last from the snows of the pass into Arbonne, the crusading army of Gorhaut are halted by their spiritual leader, and on a high plateau they kneel in their armour, every man of them, to hear the High Elder's prayer of thanksgiving to the god.

They have come through the mountains with humbling, awe-inspiring ease, only some few hundred men and horses lost to the high cold and the icy, treacherous path and the one—amazingly, only the one—avalanche that missed the main army by less than a bowshot, taking only the rear guard down into a white death with no true burial.

It might have been—it
ought
to have been—so much worse, this folly of taking an army through the mountains in winter to seize the advantage of surprise. Even the High Elder himself narrowly escaped losing his life. Standing beside their tall king, he speaks to the army with an arrow held aloft in one hand and a crimson bandage on his left arm, brilliant against his blue robe and the white of the snow behind him. He had caught up to them, wounded as he was, in the midst of the pass, riding alone—which every man there knows to have been foolhardy beyond words. Foolhardy, that is, for one not perfectly trusting of Corannos, not favoured—as Galbert de Garsenc, High Elder of Gorhaut so manifestly is—by the blessing and the protection of the god. Which means that they, too, in his company, are so blessed, the chosen, the elect, the weapons of Corannos.

This, in fact, is his message to them when the prayer is over and they rise. He holds up for all to see the Arbonnais arrow—fired by a coward, and not in a time of war—that might have killed him in his own castle. The god is with us, he tells them all, we are his agents and his instrument.

It is hard not to agree, and the men of the army of Gorhaut, in the presence of their king, are not inclined to be cynical or doubting at a time like this. They have come miraculously through the mountains in winter, and before them now, bright and fair as a dream under blue skies lies the land that has been promised them.

Promised, that is, after the scourging is done. They are the hammers of the god, the High Elder proclaims. The temples and villages of Arbonne and the depraved, unclean women who inhabit them are the anvils upon which their most holy, cleansing blows must fall.

The temples are first, the castles will come after, he tells them. Everything will come to them if they but follow their great king. The men of Arbonne are cowards, they are woman-mastered, cuckolded as a matter of course by their own musicians and barnyard servants. What, Galbert de Garsenc asks, what will such soft men do when they come face to face with the assembled might of Gorhaut sweeping down upon them with the power of the god?

They will die, he tells them, answering his own question, as a sound shaped of hunger and excitement rises among the army. They will die like the craven unbelievers they are, and when all is done, when holy Corannos is worshipped properly again in this land, then shall the men of Gorhaut have shown themselves worthy of the great favour the god has always bestowed upon them. Then shall the whole world know their worth. Then shall this sunlight, these high green valleys, vineyards and castles and grainfields, the rich cities and harbours and the great sea beyond—all shall be truly given over to Gorhaut by the high, pure grace of Corannos.