In the Ruins (4 page)

He had seen both beginning and end, only of course the end was now a beginning.

After all, he was not alone in the ruins, as he had thought. The hounds came and with them his foster father, Henri.

“Where are we going?” Alain asked him.

“Home, Son. We’re going home.”

BECAUSE the ridge had been obliterated by the dragon’s waking, their way proved rough and strenuous as they walked toward home through a jumble of boulders, fallen trees, and tide-wracked debris. In the end Alain’s legs failed him and his strength gave out. He could scarcely breathe. Once they reached a real path, Henri had to carry him, stopping at intervals to rest.

“You’re nothing but bones and skin,” Henri said one of those times. He sat, sweating, on a smooth beech tree, uprooted in last night’s storm. Alain wheezed, curled up on
the ground because he hadn’t the strength to sit upright. The hounds nosed him fretfully. “You weigh no more than a child. I’ll never forgive Lord Geoffrey for doing this to you. It’s a sin to treat another human being so cruelly.”

He was too weak to answer. The world seemed dim, but perhaps that was only because of clouds covering the sky.

Henri sighed. “You do stink, though, Son. Whew!” The affection in his voice made Alain’s lips tremble, but he could not manage a smile. For so long he had endured. Now, safe, he thought he might at last die because he had been worn too thin. He wanted to go on, but he had nothing left.

“Here, now, you beasts, move aside.”

Henri hoisted him effortlessly, shifted him onto his own back so Alain’s head rested on Henri’s shoulder, and kept walking. It seemed likely that they should have passed through Osna village, but apparently Henri kept to those woodland paths that took them around the village and onto the broad southern road. Many trees were fallen. Branches littered the path. It was silent, not even bird call to serenade them, and not a soul out on the roads the morning after. Where the road forked, Henri veered to the right along a narrower side path that wound through oak and silvery birch, maple and beech. Long ago he had ridden down this path with Count Lavastine. The memory seemed as a dream to him now, no more real than his life with Adica. All gone, torn away by death.

Yet there was life here still. Some manner of person had husbanded these woods, cutting down trees for firewood and boatbuilding in many spots but fostering quick-growing ash and sparing half the slow-growing oaks in others. Coppice-cut willow, hazel, and hawthorn flourished in various states of regrowth, some freshly cut and others ready for felling again. Sorrow barked. Pigs squealed away into the undergrowth.

“Who’s there?” came a cry from ahead.

“I’ve found him!” cried Henri.

Alain hadn’t the strength to raise his head, so, sidewise, he watched the estate emerge as the path opened onto neatly mown hayfields and a tidy garden, recently harvested.
Two corrals ringed sheep and a pair of cows. Geese honked, and chickens scattered. There was even a horse and a pony, riches for a free-holding family without noble forebears. Folk had come out of the workshop and the house to stand and stare, but it was the ones he knew best who ran up the path to meet them. Julien was scarred and lean. Stancy was pregnant; she ran forward with a child grasping her hand. Was that third adult little Agnes, grown so comely and tall?

“That can’t be Alain,” said Julien. “That creature’s nothing more than skin pulled over bones.”

“It’s him,” said Stancy. “Poor boy.” She wiped away tears.

“Stink! Stink!” wailed the child, tugging to break free and run. “He scares me.”

“Hush!” Aunt Bel strode up to them, looked at him hard, and frowned. “Stancy, kill a chicken and get a broth cooking. He’ll not be strong enough to eat solid food. Agnes, I’ll want the big basin tub for bathing him. Outside, though. Julien, haul water and tell Bruno to heat it on the workshop fire. We’ll need plenty. He can’t be chilled.”

Like the chickens, they scattered but to more purpose.

“Dear God,” said Aunt Bel. “That’s a strong smell. We’ll have to wash him twice over before we bring him inside. I’ll have the girls make a good bed for him by the hearth. He’ll be abed all winter, if he survives at all. He looks more like a ghost than like our sweet lad.”

“He can hear you.”

“Can you hear me, boy?” she demanded. Because it was Aunt Bel asking, he fluttered his eyelids and got out a croak, not much more than a sigh. “It’s a wonder he’s still alive, abused like that.” She made a clucking noise, quite disgusted. “It’s a good thing you went after him, Henri.”

“Don’t let him die, Bel. I failed him once already.”

“It’s true you let your pride get the better of you. You were jealous.”

The movement of Henri’s shoulders, beneath Alain’s chest, betrayed a reaction.

“Nay, there’s nothing more to be said,” retorted Bel. “Let it be, little brother. What’s in the past is gone with the
tide. Let him be. I’ll nurse him myself. If he lives, then we can see.”

A drop of moisture fell on Alain’s dangling hand. At first, he thought it might be rain from those brooding clouds, but as they trudged down into the riot of the living, he realized that these were Henri’s tears.

SANGLANT knew dawn came only because he could smell the sun’s rising beyond the haze that concealed all horizons. Ash rained down on his army as they straggled through the scorched forest, dragging their wounded with them. Here and there fires burned in the treetops. Smoke rose, blending with the ash drifting over them. Limbs snapped and crashed to earth to create echoes within echoes as the devastated forest collapsed on itself.

They assembled in their tattered legions around the ancient fortress where Lady Wendilgard had met her death. Up on the height of half fallen walls, Captain Fulk posted sentries to watch over the wounded. The prince stood on the shattered ramp, once a causeway leading up into the fortress and now a series of broken stair steps littered with stones, weapons, and four dead men not yet dragged away. The last surviving troops who had heard the call to sheathe weapons and retreat emerged battered, bruised, and limping from the trees to take up places in the clearing. They were crammed shoulder to shoulder, weary and frightened, and all of them awaiting his command.

Perhaps two thousand troops remained to him, out of opposing armies which had each easily boasted twice that number. Of his personal guard, once numbering more than two hundred, some two score remained. Every man among them bore at least one wound, some minor and a few, no doubt, mortal. To his left waited Capi’ra and her centaurs, who had weathered the storm better than most, and a remnant of Quman soldiers. The winged riders had been hit hard in the field by the heavier numbers of Henry’s army, but they had held their ground. It was largely due to their courage and will that he had saved as many of his troops as he had during that initial disastrous retreat when Henry’s forces had overpowered him in the early part of the battle. Of the rest of his noble brethren who had marched with him from Wendar and the marchlands, he had only two surviving commanders: Lord Wichman and Captain Istvan, the Ungrian. Lord Druthmar was lost on the field, although no man living had seen him fall, and he had long since lost track of the rest of his captains and lords, who might still be huddling in the forest or lying among the dead.

Henry’s army formed up to his right: Duchess Liutgard and her cavalry out of Fesse, Duke Burchard and his Avarians together with his daughter Wendilgard’s remaining men, and others from Saony and the duchies of Varre. The terrible storm and the blast of burning wind had hit Henry’s army as hard as his own.

Henry’s army no longer
.

Henry’s corpse lay fixed over Fest’s saddle. Sanglant held the reins.

“Your Majesty.” Hathui bowed before him. “What now?”

“Where is Zuangua?” he asked, surveying the scene. “I see no Ashioi among our number.”

“They did not follow us back this way, my lord prince …” Lewenhardt corrected himself. “Your Majesty.” Like the others, the young archer was filthy, smeared with ash and dirt and blood. Ash pattered down, the sound of its steady rain audible even through the many noises of the army creaking into place, men weeping, men talking,
horses in distress, a few dogs barking, and wagon wheels squeaking on the fine layer of ash and grit. “They went off into the trees toward the sea, along the old track they were following before. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

“I do,” Sanglant said. “They’ve abandoned us and gone home, for I’m thinking that their homeland must surely have returned from its long exile.” It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think of Liath struggling among the living or lost to death. “Hathui, if we build a fire, can you seek Liath through the flames?”

“I can try, Your Majesty.”

He nodded. She took two soldiers and trudged through the pall into the forest, where charcoal would be easy to gather. The trio passed a group of exhausted men stumbling out of the trees. The ash so covered every least thing that it was impossible to tell what lord or lady these soldiers had served before the night’s cataclysm.

All his, now. Every one of them. With his dying breath, Henry had willed Wendar and Varre to his favorite child, his obedient son, the bastard, the one the king had long wished to succeed him despite all opposition.

“
We cannot see into the future
,” Helmut Villam had once observed. That was a mercy granted to humankind, who would otherwise drown in a sea of unwanted knowledge filled with reversals, tragedies, unhoped-for rescues, and the endless contradictions of life.

He remembered the passion in his own voice that day by the river, below the palace of Werlida, when he had spoken so decidedly to his father the king. “
I don’t want to be king. Or heir. Or emperor
.”

And now, of course, he was. King, and heir to an empire he had never desired.

“What of your Aostan allies?” he asked his cousin Liutgard, nodding also at the old duke, Burchard.

The duchess shrugged, wiping ash off her lips with the back of one filthy hand. Her hair was streaked with ash, tangled and dirty; impossible to tell how fair it was under all the soot. “They fled west along the coast instead of following us,” she said. “Their allegiance was to Adelheid, not to Henry. There are yet stragglers, and a few wandering
confused among our troops. For the rest, those who live, I believe they will all fly home.”

With a sigh, Sanglant rubbed his stinging eyes. “Has there been any report of the griffins?” he asked those standing nearest to him. Clustered behind Hathui were a dozen Eagles rescued from Henry’s train.

In truth he needed no answer. If the gale had not killed the griffins outright, then it had surely blasted them far away. It seemed impossible for any creature in the air to have survived the storm.

Ai, God, he was so weary that he had begun to hear things, a strange rushing roar that nagged at his hearing until even the folk surrounding him heard as well. To the south, shouts of alarm rang out above the snap and crash of branches as though a second wind raked through the forest. Scouts left behind to stand sentry over the road tumbled into the clearing.

“The ocean! The ocean has risen!”

He gestured to Lewenhardt and Captain Fulk. Together they ran along the road into the trees, and before they had gone far they saw an astonishing sight. Water surged inland through the trees, losing depth quickly until it lapped and sighed around their boots. As they stared, it drained away, most into the ground but in a few stubborn rivulets back toward the sea, dragging twigs and leaves in its undertow. Sanglant knelt and brushed his fingers through a remnant pool as the roar of the receding waters faded. He touched the moisture to his lips, spat out the salty brine.

“This is seawater.”

“That is not possible,” said Captain Fulk. “No tide can rise so high. It’s a league at least—more!—from here to the ocean!”

“Bring Fest. I’ll need an escort of a hundred men. If there’s any hope of capturing Queen Adelheid, we must seek her now. Bring Duke Burchard, since he knows the town and its defenses. Tell Duchess Liutgard to make an account of what provisions are left us, tend to the wounded, and ready the men for a long march. Bury the dead before they begin to rot.”

“Even the emperor, Your Majesty?”

“No. We must prepare Henry for the journey north. See that his heart is removed from his body, and his flesh boiled until there is nothing left but bones.”

The road through the forest had survived the conflagration, but it was muddy and streaked with debris. The wind gusted erratically and after one man was knocked out cold by a falling branch, they watched for limbs with each flurry. The trees were blackened and burned on the side facing the southeast. Desiccated leaves filtered down with the ever present ash fall. Light rose as the morning progressed, but the day remained hazy and dim and the heavens had a glowering sheen. Every sound was muffled by the constant hiss of ash and the layer of soot and mud blanketing the damp ground. It was cool, yet clammy, and the long walk exhausted them and their horses alike.