The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  The answer came in an instant. It was obvious, if you believed the fantastic premise. “She waited until Queen Radegundis was dead.”

  “‘Radegundis swore to marry no earthly prince.’ And swore the same for her son, perhaps. Ai, God, poor Fidelis. He was a man with a full heart. If that’s so, if Queen Radegundis wanted to spare him the chains of worldly power, then Clothilde did not serve Queen Radegundis as well as the tales sing, did she? Yes, I can well believe it, having suffered her attentions.”

  “From this distance we cannot know what was in either woman’s mind.”

  “To randomly pluck a foundling girl from an obscure convent and carry her so many leagues and across two realms on such a subtle conspiracy that in the end came to nothing. It seems incredible.”

  “But it didn’t come to nothing. Where is your daughter? What happened to her? I mean to find out.”

  The last of the horses had crossed, and the rear guard, fallen into a robust drinking song perhaps to lend themselves courage, marched two abreast into the archway.

  “Hurry, Sister!” cried Mother Obligatia, clutching Rosvita’s hand briefly, then thrusting her forward. “Find out what you can!”

  Rosvita hurried forward with her heart pounding like a hammer and her breath short and painful and her knees ready to give out. The dirt was all churned and scuffed, and she kicked fresh manure in her haste, but the pungent scent exploded and gave her strength somehow to hasten on as the last soldier vanished through the shining archway. A leather pouch lay discarded on the ground just beside the glowing arch. She bent to pick it up and felt the familiar lines of the Vita together with the unbound pages of her History. Fortunatus had taken the copies and gone on, had left these for her, and with a gladdened heart she hastened after him only to hear her name,

  “Rosvita,”

  voiced as softly as a whispered curse, behind her. Light flared as she turned to look back, standing with one foot within the circle and one outside it on night-soaked earth, hoping to see Mother Obligatia, but she only saw Hugh. He stood with his staff dangling from his hands, staring after her with an unreadable expression as the threads burned and tangled and the swelling moon bloated like a dead thing until it encompassed the entire sky.

  Ai, God, what had she done? She had agreed to let him proceed with his plan. She had persuaded Theophanu to allow it to happen. With her complicity, at her urging, she had caused forbidden sorcery to flower in this holy place. Horrified, she stepped backward and was instantly awash in light, disoriented, pathless.

  But Sister Amabilia met her there in the light, smiling although her throat was cut and blood ran down the front of her cleric’s robes.

  “Dear God, Sister,” cried Rosvita, hurrying to embrace her. “Where have you been?” But she could not catch Amabilia in her arms; no matter how close she came or how fast she hurried after her, Amabilia remained always the same distance away.

  “I am murdered, Sister. They came upon me out of the forest and slew me and my escort, but they took nothing but the letter I carried for Mother Rothgard and the Circle of Unity I wore at my heart. I thought I would live to be as old and wise as you, Sister, but it was not to be. Yet do not mourn for me, for I have been granted God’s embrace. Only beware, Sister. You are in danger as well.”

  “Ai, God, Amabilia! Can this be true?” She wept, and her tears became slivers of ice in the cold wind. “No one writes as beautifully as you do. How can I work without your jesting and your kind heart beside me?”

  “Guard yourself, Sister. Guard those we love. Stay on the path.”

  Amabilia was gone. There was no one there. It had only been a vision, and no doubt a false one at that, and the road was gone as well, only her tears turned to ice beneath her feet that burned and pierced her, each step an agony. The leather pouch tucked under her arm grew hot, blistering her skin, and she swung it out and away from her and drew out the Vita to save it. But it was the book itself that cast off light and heat. Sigils woven into the cover of the book ignited like coals come alight, magical bindings and protections sewn into leather and into the parchment itself, strange symbols and familiar ones, the signs representing the planets and the sun and the moon, the Circle of Unity, Arethousan letters and other ones she did not know, peeping here and there from within Fidelis’ meticulous hand.

  Who was Fidelis protecting himself against? From whom was he hiding?

  And then they loomed above her, manifesting out of the light, resplendent and terrible, spirits burning in the aether with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives, and when their gaze struck her, it was like being struck by lightning.

  “Where is the child?”

  Their voices rolled with the searing blaze of flame torn from the Sun. She was no longer on earth, she knew that then, and she was lost because the road had vanished before her and behind her. She covered her eyes but she was already sightless, blinded by their refulgence, and desperately she staggered backward, hoping to escape.

  But she fell. She fell and the wind rushed past as though she had fallen and was falling and would fall for a thousand thousand years. Darkness swallowed her, and she saw no moon and no stars. She knew then which road she had followed: She had taken the last step over the precipice and now she was plunging forever into the bottomless pit, where her sins had led her.

  XI

  THE PALACE OF COILS

  1

  HAD Zacharias known how far away lay the palace of coils, he might not have followed her. They walked west through the marchlands that summer, and then, as the autumn rains and storms came and went, they walked through Wendar, tramping down the paths and old roads of the duchies of Fesse and Saony, on into the old queendom of Varre which now lay under the rule of Wendish kings. They came close enough to see the towers of Autun, but never did they enter any city or town. They hunted game and gathered herbs and reeds and flowers in the forests and wild lands. The horse did well enough on grass and weeds.

  Sometimes at villages he traded pelts which he’d skinned or baskets or magical charms woven by Kansi-a-lari in exchange for flour or salt or cider. Once, they traded a charm for fertility to a barren householder in exchange for a length of cloth. The young farmwife’s monthly courses had ceased just after her marriage, but no child had ever come. Kansi-a-lari’s interest in this problem amazed Zacharias. She had so little interest in the doings of humankind, but for this barren woman she interrupted their trip for fully four weeks while she plied her with hazelnut porridge, marjoram tea, and various oils and potions out of blind nettle or jessamine. Zacharias watched her carefully; he had a good memory, and she knew things that were forbidden by the church. As if by a miracle, the young woman’s courses resumed for the first time in five years. The grateful householder sewed them tunics out of the cloth, and that made the trip easier, because now Kansi-a-lari could wear something other than the skin skirt and Quman jacket and he something other than his torn frater’s robes, something to make her look a little less foreign and him look more like a man. With these disguises they could even work for bed and board at outlying farms when their supplies ran low.

  At Candlemass they paid two copper coins and a charm against warts to the ferryman who took them over the Olliar River, and when they stepped onto the opposite shore, they stood on Salian soil. Zacharias discovered to his surprise that Kansi-a-lari spoke Salian better than she spoke Wendish.

  Here in Salia, it rained perhaps one day out of ten, never snowed, and even in the mornings no more than a film of ice coated such puddles as laced the ground. It was fine weather for traveling, but he sensed a tide of desperation in the countryfolk as they surveyed their sparse winter crops and their wasted woodlands. If the rains did not come soon, there would be no spring flowering. Because of their fear, the countryfolk wanted no outlanders in their villages, so he and the Aoi woman took to camping in the woods every night. It was no great hardship. They wore tunics, now, and leggings and cloaks made of fur. He missed ale and cider, but there were run
ning streams aplenty to drink from, and he rarely suffered from the stomach complaints he had been plagued with while living as a slave among the Quman.

  They came at last to a country rich in rocks, and here their path led them to the edge of the sea. Zacharias had heard tell of the sea, but he had never seen it, a river so broad the far shore lay beyond view. Waves pounded on the shore below at the base of a rugged cliff. Farther along, the cliff gave way to a crescent of sand where spume lay in pale arcs at the highest reaches. A stream poured down through rocks and cut a channel through the sandy beach to reach the sea. Salt stung his dry lips, and he wept tears of astonishment and exhaustion as he stared at the horizon and the westering sun. The ceaseless motion of the waves made him dizzy.

  “Soon we will be there,” she said, shading her eyes against the sun. She licked her lips, as though tasting the salt in the air, then pointed west—to the horizon where the setting sun gleamed on surging waters. Or was that gleam the sun? Something else lay out there, so far away that it flickered bright against the dull waters and vanished, then reappeared as the angle of the sun brought it back into view.

  “Churendo,” she said. Behind them, two goats had ceased their grazing along the rocky verge to examine them suspiciously. A tern waded along the crescent shore below, head dipping into the water, and out, in and out. Another joined it, then a third. Clouds brushed the sea to the south.

  “We wait,” she said, “until the round moon returns.”

  They camped in a hollow where weathered driftwood had collected. He built a rough shelter while she wove walls and roof from the tough sea grass. There they waited as the crescent moon waxed to full, and in long hours of observation he learned the sea’s rhythm as the tides rose and fell with uncanny regularity. The stream gave plentiful, sweet, cold water. They caught and ate the goats, netted some fish, and scraped off the inner bark of pines for bread. Zacharias even found a few shrunken radishes, which they threw together with withered leeks to make a stew.

  On the day of the full moon, she insisted that they bathe. The water was desperately cold and the day no warmer, but she was adamant: to approach the churendo, they must be clean. They had become intimate in the way of companions on the road, and she was not afraid to examine his every crevice, his ears, his nostrils, the folds behind his knees, the place where Bulkezu had mutilated him, the skin between his toes. She used her knife to clean dirt out from under his finger and toenails. He felt like an animal being prepared for slaughter; when he was very young he had seen his grandmother wash a lamb for the spring sacrifice in this very way, checking it carefully for imperfections. But since Kansi-a-lari prepared herself in the same way, he thought maybe this was just part of some other ritual: one does not approach the holy places of the gods with unwashed ears and dirty toenails. He knew now that she had long since stopped considering him a man because she washed in front of him and allowed him to wash and check those places she couldn’t reach or see. He felt desire for her, for she was beautiful in a strange and uncomfortable way. Bulkezu had not mutilated his brain, after all. His skin flushed, and his heart beat faster, and the familiar hand of the Enemy reached into his gut to stroke at him temptingly. But there was nothing left to respond.

  She let him wear tunic and leggings but no sandals, and on his hands and feet she painted white circles, like a slave’s manacles. Her own tunic and their cloaks and sandals she stored in the horse’s saddlebags.

  It took her all afternoon first to oil herself and then to dress herself. From her five-fingered pouches she drew tiny gourds and cunningly carved nuts capped by equally tiny lids of leather, which contained seeds and dyes. She painted herself in strange swirling colors to match the tattoo that ran from shoulder to hand: burnt orange spirals on her belly and breasts, four-pointed yellow lozenges on her hips, small red circles on her buttocks, and harsh blue zigzags on her legs. On her hands and feet she painted white marks like leopard’s claws. She put on her skin skirt, tied tasseled bands around her ankles, calves, and knees, and around her neck she hung two necklaces made of polished mandibles. Into her hair she braided beads and into this beaded headdress she stuck a slender needle of bone, and three feathers: one as gold as the sun, one as green as the spring earth, one as black as the pit. She garlanded her spear with ribbons, and to the base of it she tied on the bells that she had stored away.

  At dusk, they drank their fill of the sweet stream water, and she filled two leather bottles. After that, she gave him three seeds to eat, one dry, one bitter, one sweet. Then she led him and the horse down to the crescent beach. The tiny melody of the bells accompanied them, and every fifth step she shook the spear hard to make them sing loudly. There was no wind, but it was still bitterly cold. The tide was out, far out, as if the sea had been sucked away into the maw of some great monster who lived in the nethermost depths. They walked out on the crescent beach beyond the ridgeline of vanished breakers and then farther yet as the waters seemed to recede before them and the land behind them. On they walked, the sand gritty beneath his feet but amazingly firm. He turned once, to look back, and saw the cliffs so far behind that for an instant terror blinded him.

  Long ago, he had known how to swim; a child in the marchlands learned early, just as he learned how to fish and weed and cut wood. But he had lived among the nomads for a long time, and they never entered the water because it was bad luck. Maybe he had forgotten how. Maybe the surging waves would sweep him away—

  And then where would he go? Would his soul ascend through the seven spheres to the Chamber of Light? Nay, he was no longer welcome there. Would he fall endlessly and eternally in the Abyss? And yet, what did he have to fear from the Enemy? Who was the Enemy to him, since he no longer feared and loved God?

  She knelt to draw markings in the sand, then prayed in her language, making certain gestures first to the north, then to the east, then to the south, then to the west. From her pouch she drew pebbles, and she laid a green one to the north, a reddish-orange one to the east, a dull brown one to the south, and a white one to the west. Sand glistened under the full moon. Rivulets of water coursed toward the hidden sea, a hundred fingerlets probing west through the seabed.

  Were they getting wider? Was the tide coming in?

  “We stand halfway,” she said, rising. She unstoppered one of the leather bottles and allowed him three swallows. “We must walk quickly.”

  The horse snorted nervously. A wind touched his cheek. Then it was still again. They walked on.

  “Teach me how to pray to your gods,” he said suddenly.

  After a long time, she said, “My gods are not your gods, and we do not pray to them as you pray. If you will not pray to the heaven god of your people, then you must find another god to pray to. You tell me before that your grandmother is a wise woman. Pray to the gods of your mother’s mothers. Then you will be happy, and maybe they will protect you.”

  A narrow channel of water lay before them. She waded in, and he followed. The water was only ankle-deep, but beyond it lay a second channel, then a third, each one deeper than the last. They slogged over yet another sandbank to a fourth channel, and here she had to hike up her skirt to her hips to keep it from getting wet.

  Unseen fish nibbled at his legs. When he turned to look behind, he saw only a dark line marking the shore. The horse grew more skittish. Water stirred and coiled in eddies like a nest of snakes coming awake. Wind breathed on his neck. The great monster was exhaling: the tide was coming in.

  “How soon?” he asked hoarsely.

  “There,” she said.

  There. It loomed before them out of the seabed. Looking up, he stubbed his toes on stone. She led them up a shallow-sloped stone ramp that emerged seamlessly from the sea floor as from a forgotten city buried beneath the sand. As they walked, the water swirled in around them, swallowing the glistening sands and the narrow channels, all of it subsumed until only they on the stone ramp walked dry-footed as the sea returned and with it the night wind. The moon rode high in the s
ky, drowning the stars.

  His grandmother had named the moon “the Pale Hunter,” she who watches over the life and death of animals, and at full moon her strength was greatest.

  “I pray you, Great Hunter,” he murmured, trying out the words, feeling awkward, “give me strength. Lend me some of your power.”

  An island rose steep-sided before them, a stone fort with gleaming marble walls. They climbed until the ramp ended at the base of an ebony gate. A path paved with black stone curled away on either side, a wall rising sheer on one side and cliff dropping away sheer on the other.

  She led them to the left, deocil, along the path as the waters rose along the base of the hill, slowly submerging the ramp.

  “What if it comes up higher?” he asked nervously. She did not answer him, only walked forward on the black path that circled the island. He tried to remember the prayers his grandmother had spoken, but the words had fled long since, leaving only the memory of her, old and gnarled but hale, with a wicked sense of humor. She had after many years agreed to pray before the altar of the Circle God, and the frater had rejoiced and given the entire village a great feast to celebrate her conversion, and his parents had wept with joy that she had walked at last into the Light. But he had seen her hide a carved wooden figure of The Fat One, the bringer of wisdom and plenty, in the skirts of the hearth; every time she knelt and prayed before the holy image of the Mother and Father of Life, she was really praying to The Fat One.

  They walked forever on the black path, but when they returned to the ebony gate, the waters lapped the stone ramp two man-lengths from them. It was still rising.