The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  “Ai, God! Sigfrid! What are you doing here?” Ivar leaped forward and grasped him by the arms, then hugged him. “How did you come to leave Quedlinhame?”

  Sigfrid wept a few tears. His gentle face shone with joy as he embraced Ivar in his turn. Then, with ink-stained hands, he pointed to his feet and signed, “Walk.” His feet, like Ermanrich’s were sore-ridden, callused, and filthy.

  “We were there, Sigfrid, at the death of Queen Mathilda. Baldwin and I were in hiding because we ran away from Margrave Judith, and we escaped with Prince Ekkehard, but we couldn’t stay in Quedlinhame Convent with the prince because we thought they might recognize us, but we went to the church anyway and we heard you, we heard you jump up and start preaching. They dragged you away. Did they throw you out? How did you come to be here?”

  Sigfrid didn’t answer. That supple, sharp mouth merely smiled softly, betraying the intelligence that lit his being. Sigfrid was alive in a way the rest of them weren’t. Once he believed, he believed with all of him, every particle. Ivar saw it shining from his face, and for an instant he was seized by the ugly claws of jealousy: Why should Sigfrid be granted such certainty while he spun in this agony of doubt?

  But wasn’t that only the voice of the Enemy, seeking to make him hate his friend?

  He grabbed him by the shoulders. “Sigfrid, speak to me.”

  Sigfrid indicated the wall, and his hands and then opened his mouth.

  They had cut out his tongue.

  “God’s mercy!” cried Ivar. “Who did this to you? Was it bandits on the road?” Sigfrid shook his head, all the time regarding Ivar with an expression brimming with unspilled joy.

  Ivar felt his breath coming in gasps as the awful truth dawned. “They did this to you at Quedlinhame?”

  Sigfrid signed, “Yes.”

  Simply enough: Mother Scholastica had ordered it done, but Sigfrid showed no sign of anger, of hate, of sorrow. God’s will had been done: They had cut out his tongue, but they hadn’t silenced him. Speaking with the tongue was only one way of talking.

  It all flowered then, like the rose blooming from the blood of the blessed Daisan. Sigfrid had given up his tongue because he was not afraid to speak the truth. But Ivar still had a tongue. He could still speak, just as Ermanrich preached a few blocks away.

  God had chosen them to witness the miracle. In their turn, they must give testimony. After all, it was that easy, God’s will made plain. He saw now how everything had led him to this moment, and where they would go from here, riding east with Prince Ekkehard and Lord Wichman into those lands where the hand of the false church did not grip so tightly.

  Ivar faced the crowd, now some two dozen in number. The mute girl stared at him, eyes wide, waiting.

  The whole world was waiting.

  “My friends,” he began.

  4

  IN the hours between Sext and Nones Rosvita sat in the library with the chronicle of St. Ekatarina’s convent open on the lectern before her. Most of the entries were innocuous enough: In the year 287: There was a great plague among the birds. In the year 323: The queen sent her youngest daughter to become abbess over us. In the year 402: A blizzard came untimely in Cintre and all the grapes withered. A party of clerics from Varre stayed three weeks in the guest hall. In the year 479: Certain omens were seen in the villages, and there was a comet that blazed in the southern sky for two months, and after this there was an earthquake. Many villagers came to the ladder to beg for bread. The king died in Reggio.

  Would the chronicle record Queen Adelheid’s death? In the last months of the year 729: The queen starved to death at the convent of St. Ekatarina. Or there might be other outcomes. In the year 731: The queen was strangled by her husband, John Ironhead, after a child was born to her who had a legitimate claim to the throne. Ironhead named himself regent for the infant.

  Could they trust Hugh? Would they condemn themselves by trafficking in magic, even to save their own lives? Could his claims possibly be true in any case?

  Was history merely a record of one bad choice made in place of a worse one? They had so few options left, and all of them desperate. Yet did it have to be so? She had searched in many chronicles, had learned to read between the lines and in the marginalia so that she wouldn’t discover too late things that she ought to have known, that needed to be woven into the story so that her history of the Wendish people would be complete. There was always something that had been left hidden, something that had been forgotten.

  What is in plain sight is hidden best, as the old saying went.

  The pattern developed slowly and increased markedly over the last one hundred years, after the death of Emperor Taillefer. They began as marginalia but soon appeared within the main body of the text, listings that made no sense but mostly were linked with a comment about a noble entourage that had sheltered unexpectedly in the guest hall: Hersford in the duchy of Fesse, seven stones; Krona in the duchy of Avaria, nine stones; Novomo in the county of Tuscerna, eleven stones; Thersa in the duchy of Fesse, eight stones.

  Mice scratched in the walls. “Sister Rosvita. I hope I do not disturb you?”

  She started, slapping a hand down over parchment, then chuckled as Mother Obligatia hobbled in. “I thought you were mice, and then I remembered there aren’t any mice here.” She rose hastily and drew forward a bench so that Obligatia could sit.

  “There are mice, surely enough. Most of us are mice, creeping along the halls of the powerful. If we do not stay out of their sight, they will crush us.”

  “Strong words, Mother.”

  “Surely the ways of queens and princes are no mystery to you.” She rested a hand on the Vita of St. Radegundis, which lay closed on the second lectern next to the almost finished copy, abandoned these hours by Sister Petra, who had gone to help carry water. “Have you found your answers?”

  “Nay, I have only found more questions, Mother. I am too curious. It is the burden God have given me. What am I to make of entries like this one: ‘St. Thierry in the duchy of Arconia, four stones.’ The convent of St. Thierry is near the seat of the count of Lavas, is it not?”

  “So it is,” said Obligatia, not looking at the chronicle. “I was raised in the convent of St. Thierry, although I never saw Lavas Holding myself. Who rules there now?”

  “Count Lavastine, son of the younger Charles, grandson of the elder Lavastine. His heir is a well-mannered and serious young man, Lord Alain, although I must note that he was born a bastard and only accepted as Lavastine’s heir about two years ago.

  “You are a true historian, I see. Lavastine had no legitimate heirs?”

  “He was given no child born in legal marriage. Here is another entry, a place I have visited, above Hersford Monastery.” She touched the entry. “Seven stones, just as it says here. Ai, God, Villam lost his son there, who had gone to play among the stones.”

  “The boy died?”

  “I do not know. Young Berthold vanished with six companions. No one knows what became of him, but I had always assumed that he crawled too far in the darkness and fell, and was killed. Now I’m not sure what to believe. Poor child. He had the making of a good historian. He should have been put in the church.”

  “Ah. It is always a terrible thing to lose a beloved child.”

  “These are all stone crowns, are they not? When Henry was still prince, he lost his Aoi lover at Thersa, the one who gave him his son, Sanglant. She, too, vanished among the stones, so the story goes.” She turned another page, searched it, and read out loud. “Brienac in the lordship of Josselin in Salia, seven stones. Here, another with seven stones, in the ruins of Kartiako. I did not know there were so many stone circles.”

  “No one can know, unless they look. That which is in plain sight is easily hidden.”

  “But they were built a very long time ago, even before the Dariyan Empire. The chroniclers of that time mentioned them as being ancient then, and they wondered if giants had once roamed the earth. No one knows who built them.”
r />   “Who do you think built them?”

  “Giants, perhaps. But if it were giants, then why have we never found the remains of palaces fit for giants? I think Lord Hugh is right, that the Aoi must have built them.” It was difficult to say; giving Hugh any truth undercut her desire to condemn him utterly. “If that’s so, then their secret was lost.”

  Within the walls of the convent, wind did not blow, only a faint whine heard as down a far distance. No oil burned in the library, and with the sun no longer overhead to pierce down through the shafts, it had become quite dim. Rosvita only noticed it now as she looked at the convent chronicle and had to squint to read the letters; the change had come so gradually.

  “I do not want my secrets to be lost,” said Mother Obligatia. Her fingers brushed Rosvita’s like the flutter of a moth’s wings, moved on to the Vita. “I have held them close to my breast for many years. But this book is a sign.” She opened the Vita at random and read aloud.

  “’When the women of the court came to Baralcha, they brought the finest clothing sewn of Katai silk and embroidered with thread beaten out of gold and silver, but the blessed Radegundis would not wear the garments of earth, however splendid they might be. She would not come before the emperor dressed in gold and silver but only in the robes of the poor, which she had herself woven out of nettles. And the women of the court were afraid. They feared the displeasure of the emperor would be turned on them, who brought her to the holy emperor dressed like a pauper instead of a queen, yet in her beggar’s robes the blessed Radegundis so outshone the multitude in their rich clothing that even the emperor’s fierce hounds bowed before her in recognition of her holiness.’” Her voice failed, and she shut her eyes. Like all old women, it was hard to judge her age. Her skin was wrinkled but otherwise soft and white, that of a woman who has spent much of her life indoors. She had a noblewoman’s hands, unmarked by the calluses brought on by hard labor but still strong.

  “Brother Fidelis ended his days at the monastery at Hersford,” said Rosvita, seeing that his book had uncovered a deep well of emotion in the abbess. What had brought it on? “He must have been almost one hundred years old when I spoke to him. He gave the book to me just before he died. It was his last gift. It was his testimony.”

  “Indeed, it was his testimony.” Her breath came a little ragged, as though she had been running. “That after all these years I should again touch something he once touched—”

  “You speak in riddles, Mother.” She spoke in her calmest voice, but her heart was aflame.

  “I think I fell under a spell that summer. He was old enough to be my grandfather, full fifty years of age, and I was perhaps fifteen. He worked in the garden, and because of that I thought he was a lay brother. But he was kind, and sad, and I had always been lonely and alone in the world. We girls at the convent of St. Thierry were never allowed outside the walls. Then I was uprooted from the only place I had ever known and brought to Salia, where I scarcely understood the language. I had taken a novice’s vows because I knew nothing else in life, but I found those vows were easy enough to forswear.”

  “‘I have sinned once, and greatly,’” murmured Rosvita, recalling the scene: the door made of branches lashed together, his refuge a poor hovel so crudely made that the winter winds must have whistled through its gaps day in and day out. The butterfly whisper of his voice. “‘For lying with a woman.’” The thought was almost too blasphemous to utter, but Rosvita had never shied away from wells and ditches when her curiosity led her through rough country. “You were his lover, the one he sinned with.”

  Obligatia went white, as if she had been slapped, and then she chuckled. “You are well suited to history writing.”

  “I beg you, I meant no insult! He said he still thought of her with affection.”

  A single tear budded at the corner of her eye, but it was so dry that the air wicked it away. Obligatia went on with perfect composure. “We did not sin. He did not touch me until he forswore his own vows as a monk, until we spoke the pledge of marriage before a witness, under the eyes of God. We should have left to start a life elsewhere. But we were both foundlings. We had known no place but the cloister. He thought we could remain on the estate as laborers. I see now how innocent we both were.

  “Of course it was all discovered when my pregnancy became advanced. The abbess was furious, because she wanted no stain to mar the sanctity of the convent founded by the saintly queen so recently deceased. Ai, Lady, the pain of my labor was as nothing to the pain of being separated from him. They took the child away from me as soon as it was born, but not before I saw that it was a girl. They never spoke of the child again. I never saw Fidelis again either. He was sent away, or locked away. I never knew. I was so terribly alone. Solitude is always worse once you have known companionship.

  “I was taken to a convent in Wendar and placed under a vow of silence in a hermit’s cell, but I ran away from there because my heart had broken and I could not bear to be alone with my thoughts as one day ran into the next. I could no longer hear God even in the songs of the birds. I wandered destitute for a week or more, eating berries and onion grass. I finally came to a manor house at an estate called Bodfeld. I was taken in because they wanted someone to teach their daughters Dariyan. The nearby convent dedicated to St. Felicity was run by an abbess from a family they had long feuded with, so they refused to ask her help in finding a tutor, but I had enough education to teach the girls how to read and write and figure.

  “There was a nephew, the son of the lady’s dead brother. He became infatuated with me. I was like any plant starved for water. Events progressed as they will with the young. He insisted on marrying me, and because they were kindhearted and had a plot of land somewhat away from the main house, because he mattered little in terms of their succession and I had the manners of a noblewoman and the education of a nun, they let us marry. In time, I gave birth to a boy-child. We called him Bernard, after my husband’s dead father. Then both my husband and his aunt died, and her sister came into the estate. She did not like me. She took the baby from me and gave it to a monastery to raise, since she didn’t want the expense of feeding us.”

  “How cruel,” murmured Rosvita, but Obligatia went on steadily, as if she were afraid she would not get it all out of her heart, confined there for so long in silence as she had herself been confined within the rock walls of this convent.

  “I was forced to retire to the convent of St. Felicity; but I was ill-treated there because they resented the work I had done at Bodfeld. God willed that an educated man, an Eagle who was the favorite of King Arnulf, sheltered one night at the guesthouse of the convent. It was my duty at that time to bring food for guests, although I had to slide it under a screen, for I wasn’t allowed to see them. But I was curious, and he was talkative. Four months later the abbess received a letter from the king’s schola, requesting that I be sent to study at the schola in Mainni.

  “I studied at Mainni for one year. Then that same Eagle came by the schola on his way to Darre with a party of clerics. I was taken south with them so that I might come to the attention of the skopos. I was badly injured in a fall on the passage over St. Vitale’s Pass and the party brought me here to recover. Mother Aurica took me in with the promise to send me on once I had healed. But poor Sister Lucida was left as a foundling at the ladder not two months later, and I was given the care of her, such a small, sickly child. I could not bear to leave her, and I no longer trusted the world. Mother Aurica agreed to the deception: We sent word that I had died of blood poisoning. I gave up the name Lavrentia, given me by the abbess at St. Thierry, and I took the name Obligatia, to show that I understood that God had forgiven me for my sins by giving me a child to care for. That was forty years ago.”

  The story was so incredible that Rosvita could not fasten on it all at once, and in the way of such things got hold of a small detail, almost lost in the retelling. “You must be speaking of the Eagle Wolfhere.”

  “Ah.” Her face lit,
as at an old toy rediscovered. “That was his name! I had forgotten it. Stranger yet, I saw him a year ago, at the palace of the skopos in Darre. He is an old man now, certainly, but not one whose face I would forget, for he rescued me from misery.”

  “Why were you in Darre?” Rosvita found herself compulsively stroking flat the slightly curled edges of the parchment and at once clasped her hands and set them firmly in her lap.

  “It is customary when the abbess of St. Ekatarina dies that her chosen successor travel to Darre to be blessed by the skopos. I waited in the palace guesthouse for a week before I was granted an audience with our blessed Mother, Clementia, in her audience chamber. I was there when the Eagle arrived, sent by King Henry of Wendar. I heard him tell his story of Biscop Antonia of Mainni and the accusations of sorcery laid against her. I heard Mother Clementia lay down the punishment of excommunication, and I will tell you honestly, Sister, that I feared for my daughters, the nuns who remained here while I ventured forth. What if we were accused of sorcery because of the creature who haunts the stone crown? Because of these chronicles so conscientiously recorded over the years, that take note of stone circles? What might they accuse us of, for as you have seen yourself, there are secrets hidden here. So I returned, speaking nothing.”

  “Yet you are willing to countenance Hugh of Austra working sorcery.”

  “I know what it is to be kinless and unprotected, at the mercy of those who have more power than you. Adelheid sheltered here once before, many years ago. She was a sweet, brave child, always cheerful. I would aid her if I can.”

  “But Hugh will know your secrets as well. He can use that knowledge against you.”

  Obligatia extended a hand to touch the library wall, here washed white and painted with lozenges inside lozenges, like puzzle pieces stacked one upon the next. Rosvita could not imagine living forty years within such walls, even if one learned to let the spirit fly free. A corner, a shadow, or a wall always broke the line of sight; only on the terrace did a vista open up, and then the view never changed. She had grown used to the view changing, like life, a journey where no scene is ever truly repeated, no river ever crossed twice because every river is always a new river from one hour to the next.