In the Ruins

by Kate Elliott

  “I haven’t given up. I’m not accustomed to these chains yet.”

  His sidelong gaze was measuring, not angry. “It was fairly asked. I might hope for the same courtesy in an answer.”

  “I am still a prisoner. Ask me when I am free to leave or stay as I wish.”

  “Huh,” he said, half of it a laugh and the rest nothing she could interpret. With his quirt he indicated the entrance to the general’s tent. “Go in.”

  “You’re not coming in?” she asked, and had to stop herself from grabbing his arm as at a lifeline. She could not bring herself to speak the thought that leaped into her mind: Alone, I fear the general’s anger, but if you were there I might hope for someone to protect me against it.

  He brushed a hand through his dark hair as would a man preening for a lover’s visit. “Go in,” he repeated, and lifted his quirt. “I’ve a few guards to speak to. They’ve gotten careless.”

  Careless about her.

  He nodded, dismissing her, and walked away. General Lord Alexandros’ guards moved their spears away from the entrance and let her pass. Inside, a servant unrolled a rug to cover the red-gray earth, but otherwise the general had dispensed with the opulent furnishings that had surrounded him before the great storm. No green silk draped the bare canvas walls. Chairs and rich couches were banished, replaced by a bench, a pallet, and a pitcher of water set in a copper basin, placed on a three-legged stool. He was sitting on the bench wiping dust off his face with a square of linen while a captain dressed in a red tabard gave his report. This man had an unusual accent and spoke at such a galloping pace that she had trouble understanding him.

  “… a day ahead of us … refugees … the city. They fled … the sea. These folk are the ones … the storm in the sky…”

  The general glanced up, noted her, and beckoned to a servant. “A fire,” he said softly to the man, who slipped out as the captain kept speaking.

  “… They fled to the hills … the sea … the city … they are lying … it is true … do you wish to speak to them?”

  “No, not yet. If their story is true, we will meet others who tell the same tale. If it is false, then we will soon know. Put out a double sentry line. Stay on guard against bandits and thieves.”

  As the captain left, the servant returned with a brazier heaped with glowing coals. A second man walked behind him carrying a cloth sling filled with sticks. They set up a tripod on the dirt and cradled the brazier in it.

  Alexandros gestured toward the brazier, but said nothing. She knelt in the dirt because she had not been given permission to touch the rug. One of the servants fed sticks to the coals. They blazed. She bent her attention to the flames, seeking within for those she knew: King Henry, Liath, Ivar, Prince Sanglant, Wolfhere, Sorgatani, Sister Rosvita and her retinue, Captain Thiadbold, and even her friends among the Lions, one by one.

  She saw nothing in the flames except flickering shadows. Perhaps every soul she knew had died in the storm. Possibly Ingo, Folquin, Leo, and Stephen were well and truly dead, lost in the cataclysm or in a battle she did not yet know they had fought. Probably Rosvita and the other clerics had died of thirst and starvation or been slaughtered by bandits.

  The entrance flap shifted. The movement of light across the ground startled her so much that she sat back on her heels, blinking, to see a pair of servants carry in the litter on which Lady Eudokia traveled. A trio of eunuchs placed four stools on the rug and stepped back as the servants placed the litter on this foundation, well off the ground. The eunuchs bathed the lady’s face and hands in water, then retreated.

  “What news?” the lady asked Alexandros.

  “As you see, no different than last night or the one before or every night before that. Either she lies, or she is telling the truth and has lost her Eagle’s Sight.”

  “If so, is it a temporary blindness or a permanent one?”

  He scratched his neck, grimacing, then rubbed his eyes as if he were exasperated. “What else do you know of this sorcery, Exalted Lady?”

  “Nothing I have not already told you. Its secrets are not known to us. I will attempt the camphor again, but it is the last I possess.”

  “See!” He fixed his one-eyed gaze on Hanna. A knife held to her throat could not have frightened her more. How could a common-born man rise to be called a “lord”? Either he was in league with the Enemy, or the Arethousans were stranger than any folk she understood. That he was ruthless she knew; he had done nothing to succor Princess Sapientia; he had abandoned his other hostages without, apparently, a second thought. He drove his men forward at a difficult pace and left the stragglers behind.

  “See.”

  Lady Eudokia tossed three tiny twigs onto the fire. The choking scent of camphor filled Hanna’s lungs and made her eyes water and her head pound. She saw flames, burning and burning, and although the smoke and incense made her eyes sting, she kept staring into the dance of fire.

  Let them believe she was only a breath away from success.

  “Nothing,” said Lady Eudokia, but she sounded curious more than disgusted. “We may as well cavort naked with the fire worshipers as stare at these coals.”

  The general had not moved, but Hanna felt his presence as a threat. “Is she lying, Exalted Lady?”

  “I think she is not lying. I see only flames.”

  “If we do not need her, then …”

  “Let us not be hasty, General. You are thinking as a soldier in battle. Think rather that those who brought this storm down upon us may have survived. I do not know what powers they hold to themselves. If they have the ability to cloud Eagle’s Sight, we must consider what is best for us. Hold the Eagle in reserve, in case matters change.”

  “What if it takes years?”

  She lifted a hand in a lazy gesture of disinterest. “I have an aunt who has for twenty-eight years resided in the convent of St. Mary of Gesythan. It is better for the family that she remain alive than that she be killed. None leave that isolation once they are banished within. This one can be placed in the convent as well.”

  “She is a westerner and thus a heretic.”

  “True enough. She need not receive every comfort, as do the others.”

  He scratched his neck again, leaving a trail of rashy red. “A good enough plan. But I agree only on the condition that she remain in my custody until that time, and that I be granted leave to visit her there whenever I wish.”

  “If my nephew becomes emperor, General, then these are no obstacles.”

  He nodded. She clapped her hands, and the eunuchs wiped her face again before moving back so the servants could carry her away. As the tent flap closed behind her retinue, the general turned to the soldiers waiting respectfully behind him. He pointed. A captain dressed in a blue tabard came forward and began delivering his report, but Hanna was too dizzy with fear to catch more than scraps of phrases:

  “… may be the same bandits who shadow us … may be another group … scouts can never find them … nay, never a trace …”

  She ought to memorize each utterance, to hoard them like the treasures they were. She was an Eagle. What she heard, she remembered. What she remembered, she could report to her regnant just as this man reported to his. But she could not concentrate because she could not banish from her mind a vision of whitewashed walls surrounding her, too high to be climbed and without any gate for escape.

  A pair of servants trudged in bearing buckets of water. They set them down and busied themselves with the pitcher and basin. Her eyes were still stinging. As much as she swallowed, she could not get all her fear and frustration and anger down.

  Is this all her life came to? Had she somehow angered God so much that she was to be passed from one hand to the next as a prisoner? The general might call her an Eagle, but she was no such thing. It would have been better to have stayed in Heart’s Rest and married Young Johan even with his smelly feet and braying, stupid laugh. A cow or goat was not precisely free, but at least it wasn’t caged within narrow wa
lls. She knew better than to let self-pity overwhelm her, but the temptation just for this moment was to fall and fall.

  One servant poured water from pitcher into basin. Because the scent of water hit her hard, she looked at them. They were both middle-aged men, wiry and strong, with stern expressions. They were the kind of men who have risen far enough to receive a measure of comfort and security as retainers of a powerful lord. One was, indeed, handsome enough that she might have looked twice at him if he hadn’t been old enough to be her father. Bysantius’ unwanted but flattering proposal had woken old feelings in her. It wasn’t so bad to be desired or at least respected. Ivar was lost to her. She had admired Captain Thiadbold, but held loyal to her Eagle’s vows. Rufus had, momentarily, tempted her, but in the end she had chosen the easier path. She had held herself aloof. She had never succumbed.

  Not as Liath had.

  In a way, she was envious of Liath, who had embraced passion without looking back, despite the trouble it had brought her.

  I am not so impulsive.

  Yet it wasn’t so. She had left Heart’s Rest to follow Liath. She had walked without fear into the east. She had wandered in dreams into the distant grasslands seeking the Kerayit shaman who had named Hanna as her luck.

  The good-looking servant winked at her, then rubbed at his dirty forehead with the stump of his right arm, cut off at the wrist and cleanly healed. The position of his arm concealed his mouth from his companion. His lips formed a word once, then a second time, soundless but obviously meant to be understood.

  Patience.

  She startled back. Had she imagined it? Was he speaking in Wendish?

  He and the other servant, carrying the emptied buckets, walked out the door, keeping silence as a new captain droned on with his report. She heard, in the wake of their passing, a faint tinkling like that of tiny bells shaken by a breeze.

  Five breaths later she knew, and was surprised it had taken her so long. He hadn’t been wearing a churchman’s robes but rather the simple garb of an Arethousan peasant. He had looked different, somehow; harder and keener and even, strange to say, more like a man who might want to be kissed, not a celibate churchman.

  Yet he had loved once, and passionately. Like Liath, he had leaped and never regretted.

  The rank perfume of the camphor faded, but air within the enclosed tent seemed to rush in a whirlpool around her as though stirred by daimone’s wings. Why was Brother Breschius working as a servant in the camp of his enemy’s army?

  The wasp sting burned in her heart.

  3

  SANGLANT’S army bedded down in and around yet another deserted village. The signs of abandonment did not tell a clear tale: had all the inhabitants died? Had they only fled, hearing the approach of an unknown army? Or had they fled days ago in the wake of the storm? Had some other force driven them away or taken them prisoner?

  In these distant marchland borderlands, empty wilderness stretched wide, and villages were without exception bounded by log palisades, which protected mostly against wild beasts both animal and human since a true army would make short work of such meager fortifications. This one had not burned, but the gates sat wide and the vanguard had marched in without seeing any living creature except for a pair of crows that fluttered away into the trees, cawing.

  “I miss birdsong,” Liath said. “Even in winter, there should be some about.”

  Sanglant was out on his evening round of the army. Hathui had gone with him, leaving her with a trio of Eagles who regarded her with wary interest. She did not feel easy with Sanglant’s noble brethren and preferred the company of the messengers.

  “Hanna spoke of you,” said the redheaded one called Rufus.

  “Hanna! When did you last speak with Hanna?”

  “Months ago. More than that, perhaps. A year, or more. She came south with a message from Princess Theophanu. Hathui says that she and Hanna met on the road, in Avaria or Wayland—I’m not sure which—and that Hanna knew the truth of what had happened to the king but she never confided in me or anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was watchful. That’s all I know. I liked her.”

  Liath propped her chin on a cupped fist and frowned at the Eagle. He was a likable, even-tempered young man who reminded her vaguely of Ivar but perhaps only because of his red hair. They looked nothing alike, and he did not have Ivar’s inconvenient and ill-timed passions.

  She sighed. Heart’s Rest seemed impossibly distant. That interlude with Hanna and Ivar, innocent friends, could never have happened in a world as blighted as this one. How blind she had been in those days! Hanna’s friendship was true enough, but Hanna had been struggling with her own obstacles, which Liath had blithely ignored. Ivar had never been her friend; she had pretended otherwise because his infatuation with her had made her uncomfortable.

  Because he had seemed so callow, compared to Hugh. As much as she had hated Hugh, she had never truly stopped comparing Ivar to him, and found Ivar always wanting although he was honest and true.

  “Hanna is my friend,” she said at last, seeing that the others—Rufus, dark-haired Nan, and an older man all the other Eagles called Hasty because of his deliberate way of doing things but whose name was Radamir—watched her. “I wish we had news of her.”

  “I don’t know if she survived the earthquake,” said Rufus. “That one that collapsed St. Mark’s. I heard a rumor that she and some of the king’s schola crept away during the tumult. I was gone by then. She had been placed in Presbyter Hugh’s retinue, but Duchess Liutgard was unhappy about it. He never allowed Hanna to make her full report to the king—that is, the emperor.”

  She questioned him further, but he hadn’t much more to relate although it all emerged in greatest detail, since Eagles honed their ability to memorize and recollect.

  “I pray she still lives,” Rufus finished. “She is a good woman.”

  “If any can survive this, Hanna can.”

  Behind, a commotion signaled the approach of Sanglant and his entourage: the tread of footsteps, the babble of conversation, a chuckle, a muttered wager. It never let up. Tonight he spoke with his cousin, Liutgard, whom he seemed to trust, while that bastard Wichman trailed behind making crude jokes to the Ungrian captain, Istvan, who bore his witticisms stolidly. A bevy of nobles swarmed around; a steward waited at his right hand; soldiers loitered beyond the firelight, never straying far.

  He stood straight and held the centermost place among his retinue, with that astonishing ability to know where each of his attendants were without skipping from place to place like an anxious dog seeking a pat on the head. But she could see in his face and bearing that the journey and the obligations thrust upon him were exhausting him. He was strong, but even the strongest must rest.

  Soldiers had already pitched the journeying tent in which they slept. Thank the Lord and Lady that it was too small to admit more than two people.

  She caught Captain Fulk’s attention, and he nodded at her and chivvied the king toward his pallet, separating him smoothly away from the others. Liath wasn’t sure if Fulk liked her, or even respected her, but on this account, at least, they understood one another.

  She took her leave of the Eagles and, as Sanglant’s attendants made ready to sleep, dispersed to their own encampments, or settled in for guard duty, she crawled into the tent and pulled off her boots.

  “You must come with me when I tour the army,” he said impatiently. “You must be seen at my side, as my consort. As co-regnant.”

  “I pray you, give me time. I am not yet accustomed to it.”

  She doubted she would ever become accustomed to it. She needed peace, and silence, and the company of books, but she dared not tell him that, not now. Not yet.

  He seemed about to say something, but did not, and stripped off the rest of his clothing instead. In general, unless attack was imminent, he preferred to sleep naked, and he was warm enough to protect her against the cold, which always debilitated her.

  �
�I will never get used to cold,” she said as she pulled off her shift and, shivering, pressed herself against him skin to skin while pulling furs and cloaks over them.

  “Yet you burn!” he whispered, kissing her.

  “Umm,” she said.

  But after a moment he lay back, and she rested her head on his shoulder and waited. She was getting to know him. At moments like this, he had something in his mind troubling him that he would at length spit out.

  “Are you still angry with me?” he asked. “For forbidding you from going after Blessing?”

  Guilt, like a hungry dog, will stare and stare. She had lived with its presence all day until it had become a dead weight in her stomach. His breathing was steady. Hers was not.

  “Oh, love, had I insisted on going, I would have gone, and you could not have stopped me.”

  He caught in his breath as if slapped, but said nothing; then let it out again, and still said nothing.

  She went on, because his silence hurt too much. “I abandoned her. In Verna, first, even though it wasn’t my choice to leave. For the second time out on the steppes, when we left her behind knowing she was close to death. And now, this time, for the third. So many voices chase through my head. What use is such a long journey when there are others who can make it for me? Who are better able to endure the trek. Who can serve in this way, as I can serve in others.”

  He still made no answer except to stroke her arm, shoulder to elbow, shoulder to elbow, his way of pacing when he was lying down.

  “I do not even know Blessing. I may never know her. That is the choice I face. That is the choice I made.”

  “I could have gone,” he said angrily, hoarsely, but his voice always sounded like that. “Yet she is one child. Wendar and Varre and all who live there—all who survived the cataclysm—may fall into chaos. Without the order imposed by the regnancy, there will be war between nobles, between duchies and counties. That is the choice I made. It is the obligation I accepted, although I never sought it. How is your choice different?”