The Gathering Storm (9 page)

IN the east, so it was said, the priests of the Jinna god Astareos read omens in fire. They interpreted the leap and crackle of flames, the shifting of ash along charred sticks, and the gleam of coals sinking into patterns among the cinders, finding in each trifling movement a message from the god revealing his will and the fate of those who worshiped him. But no matter how hard Zacharias stared at the twisting glare of the campfire, he could not tease any meaning from the blaze. It looked like a common fire to him, cheerfully devouring sticks and logs. Like fire, the passage of time devoured all things, even a man’s life, until it was utterly consumed. Afterward, there was only the cold beauty of an infinite universe indifferent to the fate of one insignificant human soul.

He shuddered, although on this balmy summer’s night he ought not to be cold.

“What do you think, Brother Zacharias? Do you believe the stories about the phoenix and the redemption?”

Startled, he glanced up from the fire at Chustaffus. The stocky soldier regarded him with an affable smile on his homely face. “What phoenix?” he asked.

“He wasn’t listening,” said Surly. “He never does.”

“He’s seeing dragons in the fire,” retorted Lewenhardt, the archer. “Or our future,” said quiet Den.

“Or that damned phoenix you won’t shut up about, Chuf,” added Surly, punching Chustaffus on the shoulder.

They all laughed, but in a friendly way, and resumed their gossip as they ate their supper of meat, porridge, and ale around their campfire, one of about fifty such fires scattered throughout pasturelands outside the Ungrian settlement of Nabanya. Why Prince Sanglant’s loyal soldiers tolerated a ragged, cowardly, apostate frater in their midst Zacharias could never understand, but he was grateful for their comradeship all the same. It allowed him to escape, from time to time, the prince’s court, where he served as interpreter, and the grim presence of his worst enemy who was, unfortunately, not dead yet.

“Prince Ekkehard was a traitor,” said Den. “I don’t think we should believe anything he said.”

“But he wasn’t the only one who spoke of such stories,” insisted Chustaffus. “Men died because they believed in the redemption. They were willing to die. Takes a powerful belief to embrace martyrdom like that.”

“Or a powerful stupidity.” Surly drained his cup and searched around for more ale, but they had drunk their ration. “I don’t believe it.”

“It wasn’t heresy that saved Prince Ekkehard,” said black-haired Everwin, who spoke rarely but always at length. “I hear he was treated like a lord by the Quman. If that Eagle’s testimony was true, and I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t believe it, then there’s many honest, God-fearing folk who died while Prince Ekkehard ate his fill of their plundered food and drank stolen wine and dandled women, none of them willing to have been thrown into his bed. They might have been any of our sisters forced to please him or die.”

“Prince Ekkehard wasn’t the only one who survived,” objected Chustaffus. “Don’t forget Sergeant Gotfrid of the Lions, and his men. They escaped the Quman, and shades in the forest, and bandits who sold them into slavery before the prince redeemed him. Gotfrid is a good man. He believed in
the phoenix. Even that Lord Wichman admits he saw the phoenix.”

“Give it a rest, Chuf,” said Lewenhardt. “If I have to hear about that damned phoenix one more time, I swear I’m going to put an arrow through the next one I see.”

Den, Johannes, and Everwin laughed longest at this sally, but Chustaffus took offense, and it fell to Zacharias to coax the glower off the young soldier’s face. As a slave to the Quman, he’d learned how to use his facility for words to quiet his former master’s dangerously sudden vexations.

“Many a tale is truer than people can believe, and yet others are as false as a wolf’s heart. I wonder sometimes if I really saw that dragon up in the Alfar Mountains. It might have been a dream. Yet, if I close my eyes, I can still see it gleaming in the heavens, with its tail lashing the snow on the high mountain peaks. What am I to make of that?”

The soldiers never got tired of his story of the dragon.

“Were its scales really the size and color of iron shields?” asked Lewenhardt, who had a master archer’s knack for remembering small details.

“Nothing that big can fly,” said Surly.

“Not like a bird, maybe,” said Lewenhardt. “It might be that dragons have a kind of magic that keeps them aloft. If they’re made of fire, maybe the earth repels them.”

“Kind of like you and women, eh?” asked the Karronishman, Johannes, who only spoke to tease.

“Did I show you where that Ungrian whore bit me?” Lewenhardt pulled up his tunic.

“Nay, mercy!” cried Johannes with a laugh. “I can dig up worms enough to get the idea.”

“Someone’s been eating worms,” said Surly suddenly, “and not liking the taste. There’s been talk that King Geza is going to divorce his wife and marry Princess Sapientia. That’s the best way for the prince to get rid of her.”

“Prince Sanglant would never allow that!” objected Lewenhardt. “That would give King Geza a claim to the Wendish throne through his children by the princess.”

“Hush,” said Den.

Captain Fulk approached through flowering feather grass and luxuriant fescue whose stalks shushed along his knees
and thighs. Beyond him, poplars swayed in the evening’s breeze where they grew along the banks of a river whose name Zacharias did not yet know. Where the river curved around a hill, an old, refurbished ring fort rose, seat of the local Ungrian noble family. Beyond its confines a settlement sprawled haphazardly, protected by a palisade and ditch but distinctively Ungrian because of the many stinking corrals. Every Ungrian soldier kept ten horses, it seemed, and folk who walked instead of riding were scorned as slaves and dogs. Yet who tilled the fields and kept the gardens? The farmers Zacharias had seen working in hamlets and fortified villages as Prince Sanglant and his army followed King Geza’s progress through the Ungrian kingdom were smaller and darker than the Ungrian nobles who ruled over them. Such folk were forbidden to own the very horses they were scorned for not riding.

All the men rose when Fulk halted by the fire’s light.

Lewenhardt spoke. “Captain. Is all quiet?”

“As quiet as it can be, with the army marching out in the morning.” Fulk surveyed the encampment before looking back over the six soldiers seated around the fire. “I posted you out here to keep alert, not to gossip.” He nodded at Zacharias. “Brother, I come from the prince. You’re to attend him.”

“I thought he had Brother Breschius to interpret for him tonight. Isn’t it only Ungrians and Wendishmen at the feast?”

“I don’t answer for His Highness. You’re to come at once.”

Surly began whistling a dirge, breaking off only after Chustaffus punched his arm.

“You take your watch at midnight,” said Fulk to his soldiers. “I’ll be back to check up on you.”

That sobered them. Zacharias rose, with a sigh and followed Fulk. They walked along the river, listening to the wind sighing in the poplars. Although the sun had set, the clouds to the west were still stained an intense rose-orange, the color lightening toward the zenith before fading along the eastern hills to a dusky gray.

“I miss the beech woods of home,” Fulk said. “They say we’ll ride through grasslands and river bottom all the way to the Heretic’s Sea. There are even salt marshes, the same as you’d see on the Wendish coast, but lying far from the
seashore. When I left home to join the king’s service, I never thought to journey so far east. But I suppose you’ve seen these lands before.”

“I have not. I traveled east the first time through Polenie lands.”

“Did you see any one-legged men? Women with dogs’ heads? Two-headed babies?”

“Only slaves and tyrants, the same as anywhere.”

Fulk grunted, something like a laugh. Like all of Sanglant’s personal guard, he wore a pale gold tabard marked with the sigil of a black dragon. “The Ungrians are a queer folk,” he continued, humoring Zacharias’ curtness. “As friendly as you please, and good fighters, yet I know their mothers didn’t worship God in Unity. I’d wager that half of them still sacrifice to their old gods. One of the lads said he saw a white stallion being led out at midwinter from the king’s palace, and he never saw it come in again for all that King Geza spent the Feast of St. Peter on his knees in church. God know they’re half heretics themselves, for it was Arethousan churchmen who first brought the word of the blessed Daisan to these lands.”

“It is Brother Breschius who presides over mass, not an Arethousan priest.”

“True enough. It’s said the last of the Arethousans fled Ungria when we arrived with Prince Bayan’s body last autumn. They’re worse than rats, skulking about and spreading their lies and their heresy.”

“It seems to me that there’s heresy enough in the ranks of Prince Sanglant’s army. I hear whispers of it, the phoenix and the redemption.”

Fulk had a deceptively mild expression for a man who had survived any number of hard-fought battles and had abandoned King Henry to join the war band of that king’s rebel son. His lips twitched up, as though he meant to smile, but his gaze was sharp. “If you toss an adder into a pit without water and leave it alone, it will shrivel up and die soon enough. But if you worry at it, then it will bite you and live.”

In silence they left the river and followed the track across an overgrazed pasture to the palisade gate. The ring fort had been built along the bend in the river, but in recent times
houses, craftsmen’s yards, and shepherds’ hovels had crept out below the circular ramparts and been ringed in their turn by a ditch and log palisade.

The two men crossed the plank bridge thrown over the palisade ditch and greeted the guards lounging at the open gates. With the king in residence, the Quman defeated, and a good-sized army camped in the fields beyond, the watch kept the gates open all night because of the steady traffic between town and camp.

In Ungria, peace reigned.

Half a dozen soldiers were waiting for Fulk just beyond the gate, leaning at their ease on the rails of an empty corral. As soon as they saw their captain, they fell in smartly behind him.

“A captain cannot appear before the prince without a retinue, lest he be thought unworthy of his captain’s rank,” said Fulk wryly.

“You came alone to get me.”

“So I did. I wanted to get a good look at camp without being noticed. Smell the mood of the men.”

The settlement had a lively air. A summer’s evening market thrived near the tanners’ yard, although the stench of offal, urine, and dung at times threatened to overpower the folk out bargaining over rugs, bronze buckets, drinking horns, pots of dye, woolen cloth, and an impressive variety of shields. Small children with feet caked in dried mud ran about naked. A woman sat beside a crate of scrawny hens, calling out in an incomprehensible tongue that seemed only half Ungrian to Zacharias’ ears, shot through with a coarser language closer to that spoken out on the grasslands.

Horses pounded up behind them. Zacharias glanced back just as Fulk swore irritably. A sweep of pale wings brushed the dark sky; in an instant the riders would be upon him. The frater shrieked out loud and dropped hard to the ground, clapping his hands over his head. Death came swiftly from the Quman. They would strike him down and cut off his head. Terror made him lose control; a hot gush of urine spilled down his legs.

But the horsemen swept past, ignoring him, although in their passage they overturned the crate. Freed chickens ran
squawking out into the market. One of the birds ran right over Zacharias, claws digging into his neck.

“Here, now,” said Fulk, grasping his arm to pull him up. “Did you get hit?”

They hadn’t been Quman after all, come to behead him. It was only a group of Ungrian cavalrymen wearing white cloaks, the mark of King Geza’s honor guard.

Fulk’s soldiers ran down the chickens and returned them to the woman, who was cursing and yelling. At least the commotion hid Zacharias as he staggered to his feet. The darkness hid the stain on his robe, but nothing could hide the stink of a coward. As long as he feared the Quman, and Bulkezu, he was still a slave. Blinking back tears of shame and fear, he tottered over to the dirty watering trough and plunged in as Fulk and his soldiers shouted in surprise. Chickens, goats, and children made an ear-splitting noise as they scattered from his splashing. He was sopping wet from the chest down when he climbed out. Someone in the crowd threw a rotten apple at him. He ducked, but not quickly enough, and it splattered against his chest.

“For God’s sake,” swore Fulk, dragging him along. “What madness has gotten into you now, Brother?” The ground sloped steeply up and the ramparts loomed dark and solid above them.

“I fell into a stinking pile of horse shit. Whew! I couldn’t attend the prince smelling like the stables.” As they walked into the deeper shadow of the rampart gates, lit by a single sentry’s torch, he found himself shaking still. “Next time those Ungrian soldiers will cripple some poor soul and never bother to look back to see what they’ve wrought.”

“Here, now,” said Fulk, taken aback by his ferocity but obviously thrown well off the scent, “it’s a miracle you weren’t trampled, falling like you did.”

The passage through the ramparts took a sharp turn to the left, and to the right again, lit by torches. Sentries chatted above them, up on the walls from which they watched the passage below. One of the soldiers was singing a mournful tune, his song overwhelmed by the hubbub as they came into the central courtyard of the inner fort.

The nobles were feasting in the hall, late into the summer
night, in honor of St. Edward Lloyd, a cunning and pious Alban merchant who had brought the faith of the Unities as well as tin into the east. Zacharias heard singing and laughter and saw the rich glow of a score of lamps through the open doors. Servants rushed from the kitchens into the hall, bearing full platters and pitchers, and retreated with the scraps to feed the serving folk, the beggars, and the dogs.

Fulk gave the bright hall scarcely a glance and headed straight for the stables, currently inhabited by the rest of Sanglant’s personal guard and a sizable contingent of Ungrian cavalrymen. Wolfhere met them at the door.