In the Ruins (64 page)

“Is that all? I think there is more.”

“I am looking for a woman.”

She smiled, misunderstanding him. Hathumod touched the back of a hand to her mouth, repressing a sound. She stared at Alain with a remorseful gaze. There were others behind her whom Alain recognized from court, and from his sojourn at Hersford Monastery: among them the handsome young man who had once been Margrave Judith’s husband. How long ago it seemed that he had walked up on that porch to interrupt a fight between Prior Ratbold and a ragtag collection of five clerics and two Lions! How these heretics had fetched up in Biscop Constance’s train he did not yet know.

“The woman I am looking for was an Eagle,” he continued, “and then afterward I heard a story that she ran off with Prince Sanglant.”

“Liath!” A red-haired young man stepped forward so angrily it seemed he meant to strike.

“Brother Ivar!” Constance’s tone was a reproof. Ivar shrugged a shoulder, shifted his feet, but did not move
back to his former place beside the beautiful bridegroom whose name, Alain abruptly recalled, was Baldwin. The beauty was now, incongruously, dressed as a cleric. His eyes were wide, and his right hand fingered a gold Circle of Unity whose surface was chased with filigree. He wore a ring, bright blue lapis lazuli.

Alain’s breath caught; words vanished. He knew that ring, once most precious to him.

“Go on,” said the biscop.

“I pray you,” he said, finding his voice. “Where did you get that ring, Brother?”

There was a moment of confusion. Then Baldwin looked toward the red-haired Brother Ivar, who answered.

“In a tomb buried deep in a hillside, a heathen grave far east of here. What matters it to you?”

“Ivar,” said the biscop softly, “I will suffer no disrespect toward those who come honestly before me.”

“It was the same place we got the nail,” said Hathumod, “and the Lion’s tabard and weapons. How came these things there, to such an ancient grave?”

To touch again the gift she had given him! The thought coincided with a curious look on the handsome cleric’s face as the man clutched his other hand possessively around the one on which he wore the ring.

Fingers may brush, and yet after all two people may be separated by a gulf that cannot be bridged. “Never mind it,” Alain murmured. Adica was gone. Taking the ring from a man who cherished it would not bring her back. Yet it was nevertheless difficult to speak through the pain in his heart.

“Liathano is indeed the one I seek. Have you news of her whereabouts?”

“Why do you wish to know? What business do you have with her?” demanded the redhead.

“Hush, Ivar!” Hathumod punched his arm. He shot a glance at her that pierced, but she only made a face at him.

“I would know the answers to these questions likewise,” said Constance, “although I must tell you, in truth, Alain of Osna, that I do not know what has become of the Eagle. I have been held as a prisoner by my half sister
Sabella for over five years. What news we have is scant, gathered by Brother Ivar and young Erkanwulf. King Henry has lingered many years in Aosta seeking an imperial crown. Sabella and Conrad between them have usurped the governance of Varre. Who can blame them, when Henry abandons his people? Princess Theophanu bides in Osterburg, protecting Saony, which is the ancient seat of my family’s power. Prince Sanglant defeated a Quman army at the Veser River and afterward rode east seeking griffins and sorcerers with which to battle a mysterious cabal of sorcerers who he claimed intended to destroy the world. He is said to have ridden south to Aosta in pursuit of his father and the sorcerers. More than that I do not know.”

“Ah,” said Alain. “Some knew, then, of the coming storm. It was not in vain that the Old Ones spoke to me.”

“The storm? The one that swept over us last autumn?”

“It was the final closing of a spell set in motion centuries ago.”

He surprised her, who was a woman not easily startled. She touched her left ear as if she were not at all sure she had heard those words spoken. “What mystery is this you speak of? Have you some hidden knowledge of events lost in the past in the time of the blessed Daisan?”

“This took place long before the time of the blessed Daisan. They are hidden from us only by the passage of years. Only by death, which hides us all in the end. I pray you, have you any news of the one called Liathano?”

“Of her, no. She was lost in a haze of fire.”

“Truth rises with the phoenix,” murmured the beauty, and Alain felt the pinch of those words in his heart as though some unnoticed hand were trying to get his attention.

“What did you say?” he asked him.

“‘Truth rises with the phoenix,”’ the young man repeated patiently, and his smile made the folk nearby murmur and point as if he had just done something extraordinary. “We who believe in the truth and the word speak so, to acknowledge the sacrifice made by the blessed Daisan, who died so that our sins might be forgiven.”

“Agius’ words are seeds grown in fertile soil,” said Alain.

Constance shut her eyes, touched a finger to her own lips as she might touch the mouth of a lover.

“‘His heart’s blood fell to Earth and bloomed as roses,”’ Alain added.

She looked at him, just a look, that was all. That gaze, met and answered, nothing more, until her expression shifted, grew puzzled, almost intimate, and she extended a hand and beckoned him closer. She sat in a chair at the rear of the wagon in which he had earlier seen her riding. Her breath fogged the cold air. When he stood next to her, she touched his cheek.

“You are marked as with a rose,” she said. “A curious birthmark. I’ve never seen such a one before.”

“It is not a birthmark but the memory of a false oath,” he said. “It serves to remind me of my obligation, something I cannot see except in the faces of other human beings.”

“Who are you?” she asked him, and looked at Baldwin as if for an answer, but Baldwin did not speak. He was staring at the sky and he raised a hand and pointed.

“Is that the sun? See there. It’s almost gone below the trees, but it has a bluish cast. As though haze screens it, not clouds.”

First a soldier turned, then an elderly woman. Others, facing west like the biscop and Lord Baldwin, raised hands in supplication. A flood of crying and rejoicing lifted from the assembled cavalcade as a covey of quails flush in a rush of wings up from the brush.

“The sun! It shines!”

It was more a shimmer than the actual disk of the sun. No person could stare at the sun without going blind. Everyone knew that. But along the western sky the cloud cover had altered in some manner to reveal the sun’s long hidden shape as if veiled behind only one layer of cheesecloth, not ten.

“A miracle!”

“This is the work of the Holy One!”

“Truth rises with the phoenix!”

They cried and pointed and stared, all shaken into such
a tumult of excitement that Alain walked away, slipping from one gap to the next as he squeezed out of the crowd with no one paying him any mind.
They
stared at the western horizon.
He
walked east to the edge of the camp strung out along the road and into the trees. Close to the eastern end of the camp, three soldiers had been set to guard Heric.

Alain whistled softly, but no one noticed him. Word had raced more swiftly than he could walk and they were all gazing westward. Some began to sing a song he had never heard before.

Sorrow and Rage bounded up and trotted alongside as he settled into a long stride, heading east along the road. He hadn’t much light left. He’d need to make good time, to get far enough that no one would come after him.

But after all, just as he got out of sight of the trailing end of the cavalcade’s encampment, he heard slip-slapping footsteps and labored breathing.

“My lord! My lord Alain!”

He paused and turned halfway back, waiting. Sorrow whined. Rage yawned to show teeth. She did not run, precisely, but loped in an awkward, determined way, then stumbled to halt a few steps away. The hounds made her nervous, but she was brave enough to come close despite her fear.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“East on the trail of Prince Sanglant. If any know where she is, he will.”

“Do you love her, my lord?” Tears streamed down her face.

“I hope that God have taught me to love all of humankind. But the kind of love you mean—no.”

“If I could go with you…. Will you take me with you?”

He shook his head. “I pray you, Sister. Serve where you are needed most. Every storm leaves destruction in its wake. There is much to do.”

“Yes,” she said, bowing her head obediently. “I will do as you say.” The words were thin, spoken through tears.

“You are brave and good, Hathumod. Your hands will do God’s work if you let them.”

She choked down a sob as she nodded. She had gone beyond speech and now could only stare as he gave a sign of farewell and walked away down the road. Where the road curved, he paused to look back. Eager to get on, the hounds wagged their tails.

She still stood there, fading into the twilight. She hadn’t moved at all, as if caught in the guivre’s stare.

BECAUSE she was Feather Cloak, the blood knives insisted that she be carried in a litter when she traveled. The sacred energy coiled within her body must not be allowed to escape through the soles of her feet by touching the earth.

She did not like the blood knives. They were officious and grasping, set in their ways and bloated with self-importance, and it was obvious to her that they liked her less than she liked them. She did not follow the ancient laws in the manner to which they were accustomed.

Yet she was Feather Cloak. She had been elected, according to the custom of the land. Let them chew on that gristle!

For the time being, however, she thought it best to humor them in ceremonial ways. Thus she found herself on the road in a jolting litter carried by four men, with another eight walking in front or behind to take a turn when the current group needed a rest. They traveled in procession from the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning to the city on the lake, called We-Have-No-More-Tears by the exiles but Belly-Of-The-Land resting on the Lake of Gold by those who had lived in the shadows, because that was the name they had called it in the days before exile. The turning
wheel spun at the front, announcing her presence. Her son had come with them as well. He was ripe for adventure but not yet old enough to “put on the mask.” He had the other baby slung to him, but he had dropped back to talk to one of the mask warriors, a young woman he fancied might see him as older than he was. In addition, she was accompanied by mask warriors, merchants, and judges come to witness the opening of the market, and a “bundle” of blood knives wearing scarlet tunics and the bright blue feathers of the death bird in their hair. Twenty of those blood knives in one place seemed like a lot.

“I am not accustomed to this,” said Feather Cloak to her companion, White Feather, who was walking alongside the litter carrying one of the infants in a drop-back sling.

“No, neither am I,” said White Feather.

“All the blood knives were gone by the time I was born.”

“Yes,” agreed White Feather with a flutter of her lips that resembled a grim smile. It was as much as she ever said on the matter. “So they were.”

For the past two days they had been walking through an area of dispersed settlements, most of them lying off the main road. Now, as the raised roadway curved around a field of sap cactus, they came into a community abandoned during the exile but repopulated over the winter by those who had returned from the shadows. A large residence was raised on an earth platform. Small houses were set in groups around central patios. A remarkable number of people came out to greet them, more bundles than she could estimate easily. She could not get used to the crowds. They had no doubt been alerted to her arrival by the runners sent ahead to announce the procession.

Those in the back of the crowd craned their necks to get a glimpse of her. These were all folk who had returned from the shadows. They stood differently, wore their hair differently, tilted their chins differently, and they hadn’t the stick-thin wiriness common to those who had survived exile, who had never ever in their lives gotten enough to eat except now in the days of the return when the exiles wallowed in the riches that those returned from the shadows called dearth.

“We’ll stop here for the night,” she said, suddenly wanting to talk to the ones gathered here, who stared at her but kept silent for fear of their voices polluting her.

The blood knives began to protest that they were less than a third of a day’s journey from the city on the lake, enough to make it by nightfall, but already the men who carried her heeded her command and bore her up to the residence while householders scattered to make room. The chief of the town was a man and a woman. Despite both being of middle years, they were newly married to judge by the blackened remains of wedding torches stuck in the ground on either side of the residence gateway.