In the Ruins (25 page)

“God save us,” muttered Bysantius, but he held his position.

General Lord Alexandros drew his sword.

“Leave off,” snapped Lady Eudokia. “Put me down, you
fools. Bring me my chest. Let me see what I can do to dispel this unnatural mist.”

No natural mist moved in such a manner. Hanna twisted to look behind her. Men backed away, making signs against evil. Her ears popped, and the few dogs remaining among the army began barking. As the fog advanced on a strong wind off the sea, the beasts tucked tails between legs and ran. Their fear, like a shower of arrows, struck throughout the ranks.

“Hold fast!” cried the general.

“Shit!” swore Bysantius.

“You clumsy fools!” swore Lady Eudokia, her voice cracking with anger as one of her eunuchs lost his grip on the chest and it spilled to the ground.

The fog swept in. Between one breath and the next they drowned. Not in water, but in a veil of concealment so thick that she could no longer see the general or the exalted lady. Even the head of Bysantius’ horse swam in and out of view. A tinkling of bells teased her ears, then faded.

Once, years ago, in the custody of Bulkezu, she had seen an opening and bolted, but he had caught her, of course. Of course. Yet why be ruled by fear, as were those bawling and shouting around her?

She saw her chance.

She pushed back over the mare’s rump, slid down, and landed as Bysantius called out sharply.

“The prisoner! The Eagle!”

She dared not run for the sea, not knowing what had destroyed the city and what might still lurk under the waves or on the far shore. She ran south instead, knocked into soldiers before she saw them, shook loose and kept going before they realized what hit them. She tripped once, three times, ten, but her bruised shins and aching elbows goaded her on. This time she would escape. This time it would be different even if she died in the wilderness or was hacked to death by angry Arethousan farmers.

That thought gave her pause enough to come panting to a halt, adrift in the fog with a sparse grove of trees around her, gnarled and low like the ubiquitous olives. She heard the clamor of the army behind her, surging as would the
ocean in a storm as waves strike higher rocks and disintegrate into spray.

“Form ranks! Form ranks!” cried Sergeant Bysantius, his voice ringing out of the fog. Yet she sensed no body near to hers. That he sounded close was a trick of the weather.

Maybe it wasn’t so wise to wander alone, chained, and foreign in a land so notoriously unforgiving to strangers.
Beware Arethousans
, so went the saying. They were treacherous and deceiving, liars and heretics. But they had fed her, and the sergeant and her guards had kept her safe from those who would have been happy to assault her. She stumbled forward until she lurched into a tree, and sagged there with leaves and twigs tracing the contours of her back as she tried to catch her breath. The damp air chilled her lungs. She heard a nagging chimelike sound, as though her ears were ringing. As though her mind and heart were overwhelmed and dazzled. The choice seemed impossible: give up her freedom and live, or run and die.

“Hanna!”

The voice startled her into action. Despite knowing it was the wiser course, she could not sit quietly and be recaptured. Not again. She bolted, and slammed right into a body, oversetting him.

“Ah! Ow! I pray you, don’t run, Hanna. Come with me.”

That the words were Wendish was all that stopped her from scrambling away into the fog.

“Quickly.” He grasped her arm with surprising strength. She could barely see his face, yet sound carried well in the fog by some trick of the wind. A horn belled. Men shouted, and she heard Bysantius’ voice raised above the rest.

“… the Eagle. I’ll cut off your cocks myself if she escapes….”

“Come,” said her rescuer. “We must hurry. This way.”

“Brother Breschius? How can it be?”

“Run now, answers later. Quiet. Easier for them to hear us than see us.”

He slipped his hand down her arm until he held her wrist, then set off briskly into the forest with her stumbling behind. She had so many questions she thought she might burst, but the speed of their retreat and the single-minded
intensity of his silence as he wove his way through the fog-shrouded trees without ever smacking into one kept her silent. Behind, she heard shouting and curses, the thrash of men cutting through underbrush. A hazy flicker of light marked torches.

“They’re following us!”

“Hush. Do not fear. Listen to what is in your heart. If you do, you’ll see the way as well as I do.”

What was in her heart right now was a yammering like that of dogs racing after a terrified rabbit. Yet beneath the fear she listened for the sound of her feet slapping the ground, echoed by Breschius’ surer tread and the constant singing of delicate bells. She listened for the susurration of leaves as the wind blew the mist in from the distant shore. A man’s shout rose out of the background whispers, but faded as the frater took a sudden right-hand shift in direction. She had lost track of where they were going, knew only that they still jogged through the sparse forest she had observed from the road as they had walked this day. It was prickly; every shrub and tree stabbed at her. Thorns scraped her face, but they were softened by the weight of the fog, whose passage was silent. Fog could not be heard, only seen and tasted and smelled. Its clammy touch made her hands and face grow stiff with cold. Her tongue tasted the brine of the waters. Ghostly faces loomed out of the fog but were swept away before they touched her. She fell into them. She saw with their eyes what they had seen:

The sea rises without warning and inundates the coastlands and the shining city and its impregnable walls. A wall of water rages through the strait, pouring through to reach the Heretic’s Sea beyond, but in the city that wave washes all the way into the hills before dissipating and spilling back into the strait. As suddenly as the sea swelled, it now empties until long stretches of shoreline are left bare to the sky, revealing mud-slicked rocks and here and there the remains of boats and ships foundered close to land. Indeed, a brave man—or a foolhardy one—cries out that he can walk across to the far shore, and he sets out with walking staff and a bundle of cheese and bread slung over his shoulder. Of those who have not already drowned, and they
are many because the first wave is not the deepest, some grab up what possessions and children they can easily lay hands on and hasten for the hills, but others forage through the flooded streets and down to the glistening shoreline, seeking treasure
.

All those who had not fled drowned when the second wave came, and then the third. Only afterward did the disturbance subside.

All along the coastal plain, remnants of this flood tide pooled within the fallen ruins of the city and in hollows and declivities in the land. No sun dried them out, and the earth was so saturated by water that it could not drink all that had swamped it. It was from these waters that the fog was called. Its essence could almost be tasted. What had been left behind could be bound to the will of one trained in weather magic and condensed by means of the sorcery she had learned from her teacher into a fog that would bewilder her enemy, the ones who held her luck hostage. This tempestari had sent her slave into the heart of the camp and bound him with spells so no one would discover him. Now he followed the torch of her power back to the place where she and her companions waited.

On all sides the fog concealed the land, but where Breschius walked, he walked as on a skein of silk teased out of the fog, a silvery path that led around every obstacle and wove around the contours of the landscape in a labyrinth that would confuse their pursuers. Hanna saw it now as clearly as he did. She no longer stumbled. He let go of her wrist, and together they settled into a swift walk which tired them less than running but still moved them swiftly away from the army.

She no longer heard shouts and calls but once she heard a dog’s booming bark; once she heard a horse neigh; once she heard a woman’s sobs.

“How far—?”

He raised a hand, and she stopped speaking. A silver bracelet ornamented with tiny bells gleamed at his wrist.

They walked what she judged to be about the distance from her mother’s inn to Count Harl’s hunting cottage, where if she left at dawn bearing a round of cheese destined
for the count’s table she would get there soon after midday. He gave her a leather bottle filled with sour-tasting water. She drank whenever her throat got too dry. The fog held steady for a long while, but gradually it thinned until the landscape emerged around them, insubstantial at first but gaining weight and texture.

Up here in the hills, Arethousa was a drier land by far than Heart’s Rest. Wendar boasted lush forests grown thick with undergrowth. The density of foliage washed a hundred hues of green across the hillsides. Arethousa, by contrast, was a land of gold and brown. Even the leaves had a dusty pallor and were often waxy or more like thorns than leaves. The ground layer crackled beneath her feet where she stepped on straggling vines and runners. The grass was brittle, and its chaff irritated her nose as she kicked it up with each step.

The tree cover was sparse. Often they crossed out from under what passed for shade and into a meadow of pale grass or spiny thornbush, where they caught such light as gleamed from the veiled heavens. Once, pausing, she pointed toward a lightening in the cloud cover.

“Do you think the sun is breaking through?” she asked.

“Hurry,” he said. “We’re losing the thread as the fog dissipates. Come, Hanna.”

It seemed to her that the frater’s vision was more subtle than hers. Although mist drifted within the trees and in patches across open ground, she had lost sight of the pulsing thread of light that led them. Still, she was free, she was unharmed, and although she was ravenous and light-headed, on the whole she felt content. It was an odd feeling, really, one she had rarely experienced in the last several years. She felt at ease and untroubled. At long last, it seemed, she was walking in the right direction.

He followed a defile down along stony ground, whistling the familiar melody to the psalm “Do not hide Your face from me in my time of trouble.” An animal trail led through a grove of oak trees, the only oaks she had seen for many days. They emerged into a clearing protected by high rock walls and cooled by the splash of a slender waterfall pouring off a cliff face. A scrape sounded behind
them, and she turned to see a sentry, unseen until now, slip away into the trees back along the track.

A campsite had been laid out around a pool worn into the rock below the falls. Lean-tos woven out of branches and reeds substituted for canvas tents. A fire burned under an overhang. There were two dozen or more horses confined by a fence made of thorny bushes, and a score or more people at work or rest in whatever shade they could find. She smelled meat roasting. The scent so overpowered her—she hadn’t eaten meat for months, and nothing more than a portion of gruel for days—that she staggered as the pain of hunger bit into her stomach. Breschius steadied her. Folk looked up, their faces pale beneath a layer of grime.

“Hanna!”

They reached her before she registered their identity. She was hugged and only then did she meet the gaze of Brother Fortunatus over young Gerwita’s dark head as the novice wept to see her. Fortunatus smiled as Gerwita let Hanna go and stepped aside for Sister Rosvita to come forward.

“Hanna!” The cleric embraced her. “God be praised. We feared that you were dead, but the witch told us that you yet lived.”

“The Arethousans took me prisoner,” she said, astonished to find herself crying. “Oh, it is good to see you, Sister Rosvita. Are all of you here?”

“All of us, by the grace of God. And one more—” She looked back over her shoulder to a woman sitting alone on a rock beside the pool, as might an outcast.

“That’s Princess Sapientia!”

“So it is.”

“Ai, God! What happened to her retinue?”

“We’re not sure. She rarely speaks, but it appears that King Geza divorced her and abandoned her.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I saw him speak the words just before the Arethousans took me.”

“For your Eagle’s Sight?” Rosvita released her while the others clustered around, saying little but smiling like fools.

“For my Eagle’s Sight,” replied Hanna bitterly. “Which
has abandoned me rather like King Geza abandoned Princess Sapientia. How came you here? Who are these others?”

She scanned the vale. In the shadows to the east she saw now a peculiar wagon built into a tiny house. Even veiled by shadows its colors gleamed. It alone of every object she had glimpsed in the last ten or twelve days was not coated with a layer of ashy dust. Either it had been washed clean, or the dust could find no purchase there. Sorcery works in strange ways.

“It’s Sorgatani!”

Her tongue was dry. Her vision blurred, and she swayed as the exhaustion brought on by their long walk combined with a flash of anxiety to make her knees weak and her hands damp. She had yearned to meet this mysterious stranger again and yet she feared to meet one who had laid such a frightening obligation on Hanna’s head. What did it mean to be the luck of a Kerayit shaman? It seemed she was about to find out.

“As for the others,” said Rosvita, “there in that wagon resides the pagan sorcerer we are not allowed to see. This troop of soldiers is led by Lady Bertha, who is Margrave Judith’s second daughter. They accompanied Prince Sanglant’s wife to the shores of the Middle Sea to combat the Holy Mother Anne. It seems they emerged from the crown into the midst of Anne’s camp and were set upon. In the battle, Liath was separated from the others and lost. The rest escaped. They have wandered these lands since the cataclysm, seeking news of Liath, if she yet lives.”

These words flowed past Hanna, who heard little and comprehended less as she stared at the wagon and its bright patterned walls, where lion and antelope and horse figures loped into an unseen but understood vista beyond the sight of mortal kind, known only to those who have walked between the worlds and mounted the pole of the world tree into the heavens. The utterance of Liath’s name acted as a hook and yanked her back to herself, a fish floundering out of water.