by Kate Elliott
She stood there in misery, half out of the wind and with a foot and a hand throbbing, and surveyed the landscape, what she could see of it. Beyond the shoreline, more a suggestion of textural change than an actual visible line, the landscape stretched into the distance as smoothly blank as a sea littered with fragments of lamplight. Darting fingers of brilliance moved upon that sea, illusive daimones bent upon unfathomable errands, but she could not hear the music of the spheres above the whine of that endless hot wind.
Was it the wind off the sun? Yet why then did the sun not shine here?
One question always led to another. She puzzled again over her brief sojourn among the Ashioi. How could time move differently there than on Earth? Why did day dawn and night fall with such an irregular rhythm? Why did no moon rise and set, wax and wane, in the country of the Ashioi?
Did it, too, travel the spheres? Or was there another plane of existence lying within or beside the universe which she did not comprehend? Eldest Uncle had shown her the twisted belt, his crude representation of the path on which he and his people had found themselves, but that didn’t explain where they were right now in relation to Liath.
So many mysteries.
And it were better not to linger here, dwelling over them. She might stand here forever, lost in contemplation, except that the wind blew hot in her face and the ground rubbed uncomfortably against her bare feet. Like her heart, her hand and foot were going numb.
Cold crept up her wrist like poison. Wind scalded her eyes. She couldn’t feel the coarse sand under one foot, and the lack of feeling disoriented her so much it was hard to keep her balance.
Time to move on.
The path was clearly marked, once you thought to look for it. Those lamplit sparks were stepping stones, each one about an arm’s length in diameter, set across the blistering sea. The challenge lay in stepping from one to the next with no staff for balance and feeling in only one foot. She hitched her quiver tightly against her body and set off, cautiously at first, more boldly after she got the knack of compensating for her crippled foot and navigating against the constant pressure of wind blowing so hard into her face that her eyes ran with tears.
The dark shore receded behind her, quickly lost, until only the sea surrounded her, yet she felt the presence of hulking shapes around her, impossible to distinguish. The wind stank of bitter wormwood. Will-o’-the-wisps twinkled and vanished in the distance. Even in darkness, the landscape seemed as desolate as a woman’s heart that has been scoured clean.
That fast, just before she took her next step, the wind turned. One instant it blasted her face with heat; the next it buffeted her from behind with an arctic chill. The sudden shift caught her off guard, almost tumbling her off her safe perch on a broad stepping stone. Light washed the landscape.
She stared.
The sphere of Erekes was a vale of ice, a blinding sea of whiteness.
She had always assumed that Erekes, often hidden by the sun’s glare, would reflect something of the sun’s substance: burned, charred, or at least a desert. But of course, that was the weakness of assumption. Erekes wasn’t any of the things she had expected.
Wasn’t that the lesson of the sword? If you go into battle thinking you know what to expect, the hand of confusion will always sow chaos and death in your ranks.
Yet how could she have prepared herself for this? Instead of a neat trail of beacons leading her forward, she stared at a confusing scatter of stepping stones sprayed across the icy sea, too many to count. She took an arrow and, reaching, touched the stone directly in front of her. The arrow sank through the illusory stone and, sizzling from the bite of that poisonous seawater, dissolved into ash. Only the iron tip remained, floating on the gelid surface.
Three other stepping stones remained within reach and beyond them, hundreds more, receding to an impossibly near horizon. In daylight, it was impossible to tell which of the stepping stones was real and which illusion. The sea of ice had no limit, none that she could see, and she had only seventeen arrows left. Lucian’s friend, her sword, would have come in awfully handy right now, since it appeared that the icy liquid couldn’t burn iron. But she had thrown it away.
The knife edge of the wind tore into her back. Her tunic flapped around her knees. Her long braid writhed against her back, distracting her, until she finally flipped it over her shoulder, where it whipped against her jaw. She couldn’t feel her left arm from hand to elbow, and her right leg was numb from the knee down.
A pale shape flitted in front of her, careless as a breeze. Had this daimone come to taunt her? Or did it hope to guide her? Could she hope for their aid?
“Are there any here who were made captive at Verna?” she called. “Do you know me? I am Liathano, daughter of Anne and Bernard, wife of Sanglant, mother of Blessing. Can you help me?”
She saw more of them spinning and swooping among the staggeringly bright ice floes. Their movements seemed entirely random, unfixed and purposeless. What did they care if she triumphed, or failed?
The poison filtered up her limbs. She needed a guide quickly, a creature who could survive in the aether. Truly, she only knew where to find one such creature. She had to act fast.
On Earth she had learned to mold fire into a window. It proved no different here. Even in the sphere of Erekes, frozen in ice, fire came to her call.
It flared up with an audible crack, followed by a murmurous clattering like a thousand wings battering against an unbreachable wall. The sound died quickly. In the ice floes nearest her, daimones fled from the heat.
She wrapped fire into an archway, a window to see onto distant Earth.
“Sanglant,” she called, because the link to him was the strongest chain she had.
With her poisoned hand raised to shadow her eyes, she kept the living one outstretched toward the archway of fire, bleeding and burning sparks and swirling air onto another vista, pale and blurry as through a veil. Were those vague shadows human forms? The sea hissed around her.
“Sanglant!” she cried again. A small child’s body took form beyond the archway, so bright that it shone even into Erekes, casting a shadow. “Blessing?” Her voice caught on the beloved name.
To her shock, she heard an answer.
“Mama! Mama come!”
Ai, Lady! Blessing was so big, speaking like a two-year-old. Had so much time passed in the other world already, although she had only lived among the Ashioi for a handful of days? She wanted them so badly, but she hardened her heart. How easy it was to harden her heart.
“Sanglant, if you can hear me, know that I am living, but I am on a long journey and I do not know how long it will take me.” To get back to you. She faltered. He was only a shadow dimly perceived across an untold distance. Blessing blazed in the realm of shadows, but Liath could not really be sure if anyone else heard her or even was aware of the rift she had opened between Earth and the sphere of Erekes.
“Wait for me, I beg you! Help me if you can, for I’m trapped here. I need Jerna.”
Surely if Blessing had grown so large, Liath need not feel guilty about stealing Jerna away. A child of two could thrive on porridge and soft cheese, meat and bread and goat’s milk.
A daimone flashed as a silvery form across the shadows, beyond the veil.
“I see you!” She reached out just as Jerna’s gleaming, wispy form coiled protectively around Blessing, soaking the child in Jerna’s aetherical substance. Blessing cried out in surprise and delight, a sweet sound that cut to Liath’s heart. But she could not stop now. No time to savor it. The poison had reached her left shoulder, and her right hip. If she couldn’t escape the sea of ice, she would die.
“Come if you will, Jerna. Return to your home. The way is open.”
As she reached into the whirlpool of light, wind cut her hand to ribbons. She jerked back, crying out in pain as the archway of fire collapsed into a hundred shards that spun on a whirlwind out into the sea. Reeling back, she remembered too late that she would only fall into
the poisonous sea.
But she never plunged into the depths. A cool presence wrapped itself around her, lifting her.
In the aether, Jerna’s luminescence dazzled. She had form as much as softness and only the vaguest memory of the human shape she had worn on Earth.
“Come,” she said, a murmur made by the flow of her body through the aetherical wind. On Earth, Liath had not understood the speech of the daimones, not as Sanglant had. Here, all language seemed an open book to her. “The blessing needs me no longer. This last act I will grant you, her mother, so I can become free of humankind.”
She twisted upward on a trail of gauzy mist that flowered into life as Jerna ascended. Liath’s arm and leg throbbed painfully, all pins and needles, where Jerna’s substance wrapped them in a healing glow. The pain made her head pound, and the reflection of light off the ice floes and the white sea blinded her until, dizzy, she couldn’t tell what was up and what was down and whether earthly directions had any meaning in the heavens.
A rosy glow penetrated the ice-white blaze of Erekes’ farthest boundary. Silky daimones clustered along a series of arches that formed not so much a wall as a porous, inviting border, an elaboration of detail so sensuously formed that she wondered if earthly architects saw this place in fevered dreams.
“Now am I come to my home,” whispered Jerna.
But as they reached the many-gated border, weight dragged Liath down once again.
“I cannot carry you within,” said Jerna. “You still wear too much of Earth about you, Bright One. For the sake of the blessing you allowed me to nurse, I have carried you thus far, but I can hold you no longer.”
Liath panicked as she slipped out of Jerna’s grasp. Ai, God, she would plunge back into the poisonous sea. Her clumsy fingers found her belt buckle. As she loosened it, the leather slithered down her legs, caught on her foot, and the belt and the items hitched to it—her leather pouch and her sheathed iron eating knife—fell away.
Jerna released her. The many-gated wall passed beneath her, and she tumbled into the sphere of Somorhas, whose warm and rosy light embraced her.
2
THAT first night out of Handelburg, huddled in miserable cold in such shelter as a half-ruined ancient hill fort afforded them, Hanna suggested to the prince that he and his party all shave their heads. That way they could tell any folk they met that they’d battled lice and perhaps no one would suspect they had been excommunicated for heresy. Probably she risked excommunication herself for suggesting it, but it was the most practical thing to do.
She refused to shave her own head. Until that moment, she’d never known, or even considered, that she might be vain of her white-blonde hair. Maybe she hadn’t minded Prince Bayan’s attentions as much as she had protested to herself and to others. Maybe Princess Sapientia’s jealousy had saved her from temptation.
God worked in strange ways.
When a snowstorm stranded the party for a month in a fortified village five days’ march west of Handelburg, Ekkehard spoke sternly to his retinue.
“I don’t know how long it will be until we can come clear of this village,” he said, “but there’s to be no preaching.”
“But, my lord prince,” objected Lord Benedict, always the first to speak when an opinion was asked, “it’s a worse sin to remain silent when we can save lives with the truth!”
“That’s true, but I made a promise to Prince Bayan that I wouldn’t preach until the war is over and Bulkezu is defeated. I’ll lose face if I don’t keep my promise, and no one will ever respect me. We’ll ride to the Villams and fight the Quman alongside them.” How he would fight the Quman when his wounded shoulder still hadn’t healed was a consideration no one addressed.
“We’re not riding to your father, my lord prince?” Lord Frithuric was the biggest of Ekkehard’s cronies, a strapping lad somewhat younger than Hanna.
Ekkehard shuddered. “I’ll not throw myself on my father’s mercy just yet. He’s probably still mad at me for stealing Baldwin from Margrave Judith.”
Lord Lothar was the eldest of the youths and, in Hanna’s opinion, the only one with a feather’s weight of sense. “But Margrave Judith is dead, my lord prince. Her daughter, Lady Bertha, didn’t care one whit about Lord Baldwin, except for that trouble about the marriage portion.”
“True enough,” observed Ekkehard thoughtfully. He had so thoroughly absorbed the mannerisms of the better bards who came through the royal progress that the inflections of his stock phrases all sounded as though they were copied from some epic poem, weary pronouncements of doom, wise musings, angry retorts, and noble resolutions. “Remember what Bayan said. We’ll have no one to preach to if we lose this war to the Quman savages. God would want us to fight to make Her lands safe for Her true word.”
“Very true, my lord prince,” they agreed, all six of his noble companions, Lord Dietrich’s two cousins, and nineteen miscellaneous others who had survived that five-day ride. One poor man had drowned during a river crossing, and there had been a great deal of discussion whether this meant his faith in the Sacrifice and Redemption hadn’t been strong enough to save him. Hanna personally thought that it was because he had slipped, fallen, and panicked because he hadn’t known how to swim. No one had been able to reach him in time.
“Let us all remember the phoenix,” finished Ekkehard portentously as he ran a hand through the stubble of his hair, scratching it cautiously as though it might at any moment sprout thistles. “The phoenix rises in its own time. We must have faith that we have other tasks to accomplish before the church is ready to embrace the truth.”
With a party of twenty-eight visitors in a village populated by no more than sixty souls, half of whom were children, there were indeed plenty of tasks to accomplish. Hanna knew how to make herself useful and did so, figuring their party would be better off building up a store of goodwill considering how much food they were eating. She carded and spun wool, sewed, cooked, ground grain, churned butter, and spent many a pleasant hour combing the hair of her new friends. Luckily, most of the cast-off soldiers also had practical gifts. They helped dig out the village after the first, and worst, snowfall, repaired those portions of the palisade they could reach through the drifts, built benches and tables, dug out two canoes from logs, searched out lost sheep, and otherwise kept themselves busy. Lord Dietrich’s two cousins set themselves to caring for the horses, although of course the presence of twelve horses in such a village was a terrible strain on the forage supply. Because of the heavy snow, Ekkehard was able to take his lads hunting only twice, but at least both times they brought back game to supplement the common house table. Hanna hated to think what hunger these villagers would suffer as winter gave way to the privations of early spring, with all their stores eaten up by their unexpected visitors.
Of course it was inevitable that this respite wouldn’t last, even though Ekkehard entertained the villagers every night with a princely rendition of one of the many epics he had memorized. Song couldn’t substitute for food, once all was said and done. Small irritations multiplied into fistfights. A householder complained that her entire store of apples had been eaten, so Ekkehard gave her a gold armband as restitution to keep the peace. Despite his religious vows, he took up with a village girl, although neither she nor her mother seemed displeased at the prospect of the rings and other little gifts he offered in exchange for her favors.
Lady Fortune smiled upon them. The main road, such as it was, was almost passable the morning Lord Manegold was discovered in the hayloft with the blacksmith’s young wife and her younger sister. Murder was averted when the two hotheads, Thiemo and Welf, were prevented from stabbing the furious blacksmith by the intervention of his adulterous wife, who threw herself bodily over her prone husband. By then it was already clear they were no longer welcome to stay in the village.
Prince Ekkehard was furious when they rode out at midday. “If I’d known she was willing, I wouldn’t have settled for Mistress Aabbe’s daughter, who isn’
t half as pretty.”
“I would have shared her with you,” protested Manegold. He wasn’t as handsome as the infamous Baldwin, of course, but nevertheless was an appealing sight to girls who liked pretty, blond young men born into a noble house and unburdened by any notion of consequences. His blackening eye only added to his enticing good looks. “But I’d only just discovered myself how very willing she was! And that sister! You wouldn’t think a common-born country girl would know how to do all those things!”
The villagers crowded together at the main gate, pitchforks and staves in hand, to make sure the prince and his retinue actually left. Four of the soldiers walked at the front, breaking trail. Lord Welf rode directly behind them, carrying Ekkehard’s gold-and-red battle banner. This tattered and much-mended piece of cloth had, like Ekkehard himself, been rescued off the battlefield by the tumulus, so its presence was considered a sign of good luck as well as status, marking the progress of a royal prince. However meager his retinue might be.
“Perhaps, my lord prince,” said Hanna reluctantly, “in the future you and your followers might be more cautious in your amorous trysts. In a marchland village such as this, the blacksmith is an honored member of the community and not to be insulted in such a grave way.”
“You haven’t the right to say that kind of thing to me!” replied Ekkehard indignantly.
“I ride as the king’s representative, my lord prince. The villagers were generous with their hospitality. I am sure King Henry would think it unwise to repay their generosity in such a way that they throw us out.”
“How will King Henry ever know if there’s no one to report to him?” demanded Lord Thiemo, laying a hand on his sword hilt.