Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  “Dog!” snorted the youth. “A good name, don’t you think? We could clean him up and take him in the barracks as a mascot, Calos. Put him up on a chair by the door and teach him to say ‘dog’ every time one of Captain Alfonse’s Salian braggarts comes past.”

  Calos choked down a laugh, but it was easy to see the notion amused him.

  “The lady has Salian soldiers in her retinue?” Alain asked.

  “Oh, plenty of them, the cursed snails!” said the youth with the good humor of a man who has suffered no real harm from disparaging his comrades. “Foul-tempered and gluttonous. They come with that Salian lord who is one of my lady’s commanders but I don’t recall his name. Lots of Salians. They’ve got no king now. All at each other’s throats, so it’s said. No wonder they come east, these ones. It’s safer here.”

  “It wasn’t for those driven out into the woods,” said Alain, waving an arm back the way he had come.

  “They brought their own trouble down on them,” said Calos with a sneer. “What of the little lad? I’m liking this idea of Jochim’s the more I think on it. Up their craw, and them not daring to hurt a tiny babe so crippled as this one is.”

  “Would you treat a dog so?” Alain asked, angered by their suggestion.

  “We treat our dogs well!” retorted Calos indignantly. “What do you take us for? Any dog we take in, we treat well. Train it. Feed it.”

  “You’d treat this child as nothing more than that?”

  Calos shook his head. “What are you thinking, friend?” he said, with a tilted smile and a narrowed gaze, as if he were scolding Alain or laughing at his naivety. “This poor child has never in his life been treated as well as us troopers under the command of Captain Lukas treat our good dogs. I’ll swear to you he’ll do as well. Better than he’s done. We need a laugh in our barracks.”

  “What happens to the child when you go home to your villages?”

  Both of them laughed, but the laughter concealed pain. “I was born in town,” said Calos. “The lady’s service is my life, friend. As for Jochim here, he’s got no village to go back to. Flooded out, it was, when the river went running backward last autumn. His whole family died in them floods and most of the other folk in the place likewise. The rest had to beg in the lanes and I suppose most of them died over the winter and early spring. He’s lucky to get a meal every day and a bed to sleep in. He’s lucky we took him in, seeing him a likely soldier. So will you be—lucky if we take you in. Or haven’t you heard? Times are hard. If these frosts don’t lift, if the sun don’t come, if the crops don’t grow, they’ll get worse. Much worse.”

  “I pray you,” whispered young Jochim, wiping a tear from his eye. “Don’t speak such ill words. The Enemy hears us.”

  “Are you coming?” asked Calos. “Can we adopt the little lad?”

  He wasn’t afraid to meet Alain’s gaze, dead on, searching as much as he was searched. An honest man, of his kind, not compassionate but not cruel either; he meant what he said. He did his job, and was loyal to those he had pledged his loyalty to. Maybe he was right about the child. Maybe the most a beggar’s crippled and abandoned orphan son could hope for in these days was to be treated as well as a well-kept dog.

  2

  CAPTAIN Lukas was a hard-living man who found the idea of a child mascot who could only say the word “dog” just as amusing as did his soldiers. That he hated the Salian interlopers need not be spoken out loud. The locals in Autun had always hated the Salians. It was in their blood. That the beloved Emperor Taillefer had been himself a Salian, had been emperor of Salia and Varre and much more land besides, and had built his famous chapel and palace in Autun and ruled from here as much as he ruled from any one place, was beside the point. That he had chosen to be buried here just went to show that Taillefer wasn’t a Salian, not really. He’d been born on an estate in what was now Varingia, so the story went, so he was really of Varre and that meant that Varre had once conquered Salia, not the other way around.

  “I like it,” said the captain, laughing with his sergeants as Calos and Jochim looked on. He slapped his thigh. “Yes! Best keep him well fed, though, and get the dogs to guard him, so we can say he’s just speaking to them. All innocent!”

  Alain didn’t like it, but he understood he had no viable alternative. The world could not be changed in one day or one year and it was possible it could not be changed at all. It was just possible that this trivial and even selfish act of kindness toward a crippled, illegitimate orphan outweighed a hundred more apparently momentous acts involving the great and powerful of the land. Dog, as they were all calling the boy now, was sitting in a corner slurping down porridge and had shown no fear in the barracks with men coming and going and talking in loud voices, jostling, coughing, laughing, and singing out crude jokes.

  “Someone has got to wash him,” added the captain. “Calos, you take care of it, as you brought him in.”

  “Jochim, you take care of it,” said Calos. “What of this man, who says he was a Lion?” He gestured toward Alain, who stood quietly to one side.

  “Let me see those dogs you say come with him,” said Captain Lukas, and he strolled with exaggerated casualness over to the door and squinted along the porch. Sorrow and Rage regarded him with their dark eyes. When they saw Alain, they thumped their tails on the plank sidewalk but did not otherwise move.

  The captain looked at those dogs for a long time. Then he looked at Alain. The captain recognized him. Alain saw it in the smile trapped on his lips, in the way he scratched at his forehead to give himself something to do while he considered, in the way he tapped a foot three times on the porch as he reached a conclusion.

  “Best we go see the lady,” he said to the air. He turned back to beckon his sergeants closer. “I’ll need a dozen men. Sergeant Andros, you are in charge here while I’m gone.”

  “There’s to be a sweep of the southwest quarter this afternoon, Captain.”

  “Proceed as usual.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “If you will.” The captain indicated to Alain that they would walk together. “Surely you have come here in order to see Lady Sabella.” Without allowing Alain a chance to answer, he began issuing orders to the dozen men hurrying out to accompany them.

  They stood in the dusty forecourt of what had once been a merchant’s warehouse complex but was now both barracks and stable. There were two long warehouses linked at their northern ends by a spacious hall. An open kitchen and small storage sheds fenced in the southern end of the compound. The men lived in one half of the hall, their horses in the other. There were three troops quartered here, one in each structure, about three hundred men in all if Alain’s estimate of the size of Captain Lukas’ troop was correct. Men lounged by the open doors of their living space keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the other soldiers, friends and rivals alike. Dogs slunk along at the base of each porch, looking for scraps of food or a friendly pat. They kept clear of Sorrow and Rage, but a rare bold bitch ventured up and sniffed them over. A cart laden with manure trundled past, pushed by a pair of soldiers headed out to the fields. The open dirt yard stank of sweat and shit and urine and dust and that peculiar intangible scent of men sizing each other up for weakness. A pair of men were joking in loud voices.

  “Eh, those Varre boars! Look, there goes the ass-licking captain now!”

  Alain glanced at the captain, but he took no mind of the words. In fact, Captain Lukas seemed not to have understood them at all. As if they were speaking in a language he could not understand, but one that Alain could. The swirl of movement, of men going about their business and dogs hanging back to allow the hounds to pass without challenging them and a horse backing nervously away from the entrance into the stables, so disoriented Alain that he felt the world spinning around him. He staggered and reached out to catch himself

  they skate into Rikin Fjord across a skin of still water so clear that he dreams he can see fathoms into the deeps, down to the ancient seabed carved aeons
ago out of glittering rock. But that is only an illusion. What he sees are the backs of a swarm of fish schooling around his hull.

  One surfaces

  No fish, these, but an entire tribe of merfolk. He leans on the rail, studying them. On deck, soldiers exclaim. Always, as they crossed the northern sea, they sailed with an escort of merfolk off their bow and behind the stern. These here, he thinks, are more like a ravening pack of wolves descending on a slaughter ground.

  “Beware!” calls Deacon Ursuline, among his counselors.

  Papa Otto calls from the stern. “A swarm has gathered here. I don’t like the look of these! I think they mean to do us harm!”

  As if the words are sorcery, the boat heels starboard. His heels skid backward and he grabs the rail to stop himself from falling onto the deck, but just as he gets his feet up and under him, the ship heels again, seesawing to port side so abruptly that he cannot stop himself. He pitches forward, loses his hold on the railing, and plunges into the cold blue water of the fjord.

  Icy water splashed his face as he caught himself on a hitching post, finding his balance although the ground still seemed to tilt and rock.

  Captain Lukas swore. “Bitch of a weather! Feel that rain! You’d think it was still winter, by how cold it is!”

  Alain blinked rain out of his eyes and shook his head to clear it. The shower had taken them all by surprise as it swept across the courtyard. Dogs and men ran for shelter. The captain laughed and shamed his men into moving more slowly.

  “What? Are you running at the first cold drop? What, are you prissy snails?”

  The vision, come so fast and unexpectedly, faded as the sights and smells of the compound drowned him. They passed between the kitchens, which smelled of porridge and smoke, and a storehouse, whose door was propped open. Inside, a score of folk huddled in the interior around a cluster of beds, sitting, lying down, coughing: a sickroom, perhaps. A child at the door watched them walk by with wide eyes and a somber expression.

  “You’ve been on the road too many days,” said the captain. “The lady does not like the smell of the road. Baths first.”

  “Can I take the plunge, Captain?” asked one of the escorts.

  “Eh! I’d like a good washing, Captain!” said another.

  “There’s some new wash girls at the baths, I hear,” laughed a third. “Not like in the old days, if you take my meaning. More to our liking.”

  “Hush,” Captain Lukas said, but he wasn’t angry at his men. If anything, the comments caused him to lapse into a thoughtful silence.

  These barracks lay near the southern gate and were not particularly close to the palace complex, which sat on a hill. The streets had little traffic considering the time of day. Twice they passed warehouses, each one guarded by a dozen soldiers.

  “What do they guard?” Alain asked.

  “Grain. As precious as gold.”

  A few folk tended garden spaces in empty lots. Autun had not quite filled out the space between the walls built in the days of Taillefer, or else old buildings had fallen down and not been reconstructed, with the dirt around the foundations left to go to seed. A woman and man straightened from poking at freshly dug troughs to watch the soldiers pass. Like the child at the storehouse door, they called out no greeting, nor did the captain nod at them to acknowledge their presence. Their silence troubled Alain, who had an idea that relations between townsfolk and soldiers had once been easier.

  The baths lay at the base of the palatine hill. The original structure was built by the old Dariyans, but it had been refurbished a hundred years ago and had not deteriorated overly much since then. Sorrow and Rage sat under a portico with a pair of nervous minders to guard them. Within the stone halls a pair of old women held sway, although it was true they were assisted by a quintet of younger, fairer lasses, banished to the back chambers as soon as the soldiers came in.

  “This one,” said Captain Lukas, pushing Alain forward. “I’ll be back to fetch him.”

  They took him to a room where he stripped. The attendants examined him with the look of women who have seen every possible thing the world has to offer. They even pinched his buttocks and measured the span of his arms with cupped hands.

  “Pleasing enough,” the taller commented to the shorter in a murmur he was not meant to hear. “Too thin.”

  “Aren’t they all these days?”

  His clothes were taken away and two buckets of water brought by a gangling youth, who retreated as soon as he set the buckets on the stone floor.

  “Raise your arms!” said the old woman.

  Obedient, he raised his arms.

  “Shut your eyes!”

  He shut his eyes.

  The water hits so hard he thinks his heart will seize. The cold sluices down his face, his neck. He is wet through in an instant and so cold he goes stiff, lips locked in a grimace, limbs in a rictus.

  How can anything be so cold?

  Then he remembers that cold causes him no injury, not as it does humankind. He is drowning in his vision. He must open his eyes, and quickly. Why did the ship surge in the waves so suddenly?

  He opens his eyes as the water streams past, as a weight nudges him, then pushes, hard, and he flails through the water trying to get his bearings so he can reach the surface.

  He is surrounded by merfolk.

  They are circling, as for a kill.

  They mean to kill him.

  “Why?” asked the taller crone sarcastically. “Why? You don’t think we’re letting you get in the baths as filthy as you are? You wash that dirt off first. Then you can soak.”

  “So cold!” he said between gritted teeth. Goose bumps had erupted all over his skin, but he could not tell if it were the cold water or the upwelling of fear that made him shiver uncontrollably.

  “We should heat it up for you? Well, if you’d split the wood and paid for it before-times, maybe we’d consider it!”

  “Don’t curse your fortune, young man. You’re one of the lucky ones!”

  They were both old and spry, well enough fed by the evidence of their plump cheeks and ample hips, cheerful enough to be amused by him but nevertheless watchful, glancing at frequent intervals toward the door as if expecting someone to come charging in. They went on chattering, and the flood of words calmed his trembling.

  “Getting a bath at all! Used to be under the rule of Biscop Constance that the common folk in town might pay a sceatta for use of the baths on Hefensdays, Secundays, and Jeddays, but not now. Reserved for the lady’s noble entourage and her captains.”

  “Will you stop it?” said the other one in that same undertone. “If they throw us out of town for speaking sedition against the lady, my family will starve! You might speak, and I keep silence, and I’ll be guilty same as you.” She handed Alain a greasy lump of scouring soap. “Begging your pardon, my lord. We mean no harm by our whispering.”

  “I’m no lord,” he said, taking the soap gratefully, “and I thank you for your trouble.” He scrubbed. He was not as dirty as he might have been, not nearly as filthy as he had once been, but it felt good to feel the dirt loosen and come free.

  They chortled, as if he had made a joke. The taller one left. The shorter swept water into the drain as he washed his hair.

  “All done?”

  He braced himself for the deluge. The water hit.

  Ice. Gasping. The air leaves his lungs and bubbles to the surface. A shape looms out of the water, so close that those teeth seem about to close over his face. He finds his knife and draws it, but it catches in folds of his trousers.

  “Too late,” whispers the merman, and it is strange he can speak underwater in words Stronghand can understand. “It is too late for you, Stronghand. Now I am the victor, although you won at Kjalmarsfjord.”

  It is strange that he speaks with the voice of Nokvi, Stronghand’s last rival among the Eika.

  Gasping, he flailed.

  “Hey, now! Hey!” said the attendant. She poked him in the ribs with the end
of her broom, and the jab got him coughing. “If you’re going to be violent, I’m calling the guards!”

  “No, I beg your pardon. I just—” There was nothing he could say.

  Nokvi, Stronghand’s last rival for the overlordship of the Eika, was dead. Stronghand had himself struck the killing blow and pushed Nokvi overboard into the grasp of the merfolk. That battle at Kjalmarsfjord Alain had fought in between breaths as he had himself fought on the hill with the doomed Lions by Queen’s Grave, when he had at the last been cut down and killed by the Lady of Battles. How was it that Nokvi spoke out of the depths?

  “Yes,” said the crone, amused now that she saw Alain would not act rashly, “it strikes all the healthy young men so, bawling like babes when the cold water hits them. On you go, to the hot baths.”

  She prodded him with the broom, the straw bristles harsh on the tender skin of his buttocks, and he yelped—and she chuckled—as he hurried into the next chamber. This vaulted stone chamber was taken up with a tiled bath smelling of mineral salts. Steam rose from vents in the floor. He stepped in, sitting straight down onto a shelf resting a torso’s height below the surface, but the intense heat took him by surprise. A wave of faintness swelled up into his head as might a surge in the sea, and he sank

  water pouring over his face. This time will it be the end?

  No.

  Never.

  Not this way.

  He means to die peacefully in his bed, not taken by surprise in this ignominious manner by a vanquished enemy who is dead. Whom he killed.

  It is only a merman, smarter than a dog and not as intelligent as a man. Nevertheless, a furious merman bent on revenge while his enemy drowns in the water remains a formidable opponent.

  As the creature dives in for the kill, Stronghand rolls in the water and kicks, connecting with the torso of the merman. The move is sluggish, the reaction oddly muted, because the water causes all movement to become slow and ungainly—for humankind. The merfolk have no such restriction. The sea is their element, just as rock and fire and air are his.