by Kate Elliott
She turned her horse and fled.
She rode, walked beside her horse, rode again, then trotted again alongside her tired mount. But though a winter’s day was short, this one seemed to drag on and on. The forest would never end.
At dusk, at last and amazingly, it gave into scrub and overcut woods. Pigs scattered away from her. Fields which cut into stands of trees like gaping scars lightened her way. She was still shaking with reaction when she reached the town of Laar as the waxing gibbous moon rose behind her.
At the closed gates she called out. “I beg you. I am a King’s Eagle riding on the king’s business. Give me shelter!”
The gate creaked open, and they let her in. Good Varren villagers, they were not sympathetic to Henry, but she was a lass riding alone and, when it came down to it, they were eager to hear what news she had.
The village deacon led the horse away at once and applied a salve of holy water, dock, and stitchwort to the elfshot gash while singing psalms over the wounded beast. “It is clear you have been at your prayers, daughter,” said the deacon, “for surely the intervention of St. Herodia— whose feast day this is—saved you from harm this day.”
Liath left the horse in the deacon’s care and let herself be escorted to a longhouse where the whole village gathered to watch her eat a cold supper. The villagers knew of the bandits and were glad to be rid of them, and it was clear that Laar’s townsfolk had long ago resigned themselves to the depredations of the nameless creatures who lurked in the forest.
“Do you know what they are?” Liath demanded.
“The shades of dead elves,” said the householder who had taken her in.
“They are doomed to wander the earth,” said a village elder, “because they cannot ascend to the Chamber of Light.”
“My wise aunt told me the Lost Ones ruled here once,” added the householder. “Their shades can’t bear to leave the scene of their great glory. So they haunt us and try to drive us away so that their kin can come back and rule again.”
One tale led to another, and of course they wanted to know what message she took to Count Lavastine, whom they had heard tell of; his southernmost holdings lay not ten days’ ride from here. A few of the villagers had even seen the count and his army when they had returned this way last summer after the battle at Kassel.
“He had his heir with him,” said the householder. “A good-looking boy, tall and noble. What does the king want with Count Lavastine? Him being Varrish, and all, and the king Wendish. Maybe the king don’t like Varrish counts.”
So she told them about Gent.
“Ai, the Dragons!” said one old woman. “I saw the Dragons years ago! Very glorious, they was.”
That night, lying rolled in her cloak before the hearth fire, she dreamed of the Eika dogs.
XII
READING THE
BONES
1
AS winter dragged on and the Eika left in Gent grew bored, Sanglant began to lose his dogs. Like his Dragons, they fought for him when he was attacked. Like his Dragons, they died. He did what he could to save them, but it was never enough.
Eika needed to fight and the combats they arranged against slaves were terrible to watch. The few combats they arranged against him, they lost. It was beneath their dignity to fight him many against one or with a weapon while he stood unarmed, and he had honed his skills so well over the months that none of them, however stout or bold, could best him.
That some Eika still raided he knew when one of the restless princeling sons brought in a few pathetic slaves or a handful of baubles to parade in front of Bloodheart, but the pickings in the region around Gent were pitifully thin by now after three seasons of raiding. Others hosted gatherings during which one or another of the savages would tell a tale of butchery in their harsh language that sometimes included horrible reenactments with living slaves, poor doomed souls.
Such shows impressed Bloodheart not at all. He, too, was restless. He played his bone flutes. He played with his powers, such as they were—Sanglant had little experience with sorcery and did not know how to measure what he saw: webs of light caging the cathedral with brightness; keening dragons that filled the vast nave with slashing tails and searing fire before they dissolved into mist; glowing swarms of mitelike bees that tormented Sanglant, stinging him until his hands and face swelled—only, all at once, to vanish together with the swelling when Bloodheart grew tired of the game and put down his flutes.
When the madness threatened to descend, he took refuge in his manor house, built as painstakingly over the winter as if he had sawed the logs and raised the roof with his own hands. The vision of the manor house saved him from the black cloud more times than he could count.
But it was never enough.
He smelled smoke on the wind, fires burning in the city, and then the acrid stench of charred wood. He heard the Eika play their game, day in and day out, in the square that fronted the cathedral. Always the winning team howled and laughed as they threw their trophy, the sack containing its gruesome burden, down in front of Bloodheart. Perhaps they moved more sluggishly in the cold, but neither heat nor cold, not the bitter hard wind or the silence of a dense snow, not the lash of freezing rain or the dull ache of a cold that chills down to the bones affected them adversely, no more than it did a rock.
As winter eked its way toward spring and the days grew longer, he noticed a change in their appearance. More of them now wore leather armor cut from the tanneries of Gent or carried spears and axes and iron-pointed arrows forged in Gent’s smithies. The cries of the slaves came to his ears day and night, but there was nothing he could do to help them.
There was nothing he could do but watch, and think. Spring was coming. The river would soon flow at floodtide. Few ships would sail upstream until late spring. But Bloodheart was mustering an army. Any fool, even a mad fool, could see that. Daily, Eika came and went. Some—for Sanglant could now tell certain ones apart from the rest—did not return, as if they had died on their errand or, perhaps, gone a much longer way away. Surely not even Eika dared to cross the northern seas in winter, but who could know? They were savages, and savages might try anything.
Chained here as he was, he could only watch. If he could keep the madness at bay, like the dogs, he could think. He could try to plan.
Bloodheart must not muster an army out of Gent. The Veser River ran deep into Wendish lands and with enough ships and a clear road past Gent, Bloodheart and his Eika army could wreak havoc on Henry’s lands.
Even Bloodheart must have a weakness. He needed only to be clear-sighted, like Liath, to find it out.
Certain things he observed.
A small gallery—the choir—ran above the nave along one side of the cathedral, but no Eika ever walked here or crowded above to stare down at their brothers.
The dogs never had puppies, nor did they ever seem to mate.
Just as he was tethered to the altar stone by his chains, so the Eika priest seemed tethered to Bloodheart. If Bloodheart sat on his throne, the priest did not venture out of doors. If Bloodheart left the cathedral as he did four times a day, then the priest left as well, dogging the chieftain’s heels.
The Eika showed no sexual interest in their slaves, none that he had ever seen; perhaps their contempt for their human enemies ran too deep for such intercourse.
Wooden chest and leather pouch never left the priest’s care. From the pouch he drew the bones which he read to prophesy the future. The chest he never opened.
However many Eika crowded the nave, they never stank. Humans stank; Sanglant knew that well enough because he had lived so long among them. The king’s progress reeked with the smell of many humans jostled together. Villages and estates had each their own aroma of sweat and mold and damp wool, cesspits and rotting meat, women’s holy blood, manure, all the lingering smells of human activity in the smithies and tanneries, the butcheries and the bakeries rolled into a fetid whole. He suspected the Eika thought he stank, even though he was on
ly half of human kin. But it had been months since he had washed; even the dogs were cleaner than he was.
Ai, Lady, he was no better than a wild animal rolling in the forest loam, matted with filth—though he took what care he could of himself. But it was never enough.
When would King Henry come? Sanglant understood now that he could not die here among the dogs. His mother’s geas was also a curse, for death would have been a blessing; it had been one for his faithful Dragons whose bones rotted in the crypt or, smoothed and bored, made music for Bloodheart’s pleasure. That some other event had prevented Henry from marching last autumn on Gent Sanglant believed. Not for Sanglant’s sake: Revenge was a luxury. But Henry had to retake Gent.
And someone had to stop Bloodheart.
If one only looked clearly at what lay in plain sight, the answer was obvious. He was amazed that it had taken him this long to realize it. He knew how to kill Bloodheart, if only he could get close enough.
2
IVAR was of such little importance to Mother Scholastica that she allowed Master Pursed-Lips to deliver the message, which might as well have been a death blow.
“I’ll hear no more complaining from you, feckless creature!” scolded the schoolmaster. He did not exactly smile, but he clearly felt an unpleasant glee in the words which followed. “Your lord father has replied at last to your unseemly request to be released from your vows. Of course you are to stay in the monastery. You will offer up your prayers in the service of your kin—those living and those now dead. Now.” He rapped Ivar hard on the knuckles with his switch. “Get back to your labors!”
What choice did he have? The daily round at Quedlinhame was, in its own monotonous way, soothing to his bruised heart. Trapped forever. Even Liath had rejected him, and that after everything he had promised to do for her.
Only once a day did this monotony lift, did he feel one iota stirred from the numbness that afflicted his heart and soul. And even this event was attended by obstacles.
“The problem,” said Baldwin, “is that we can’t get close enough to her. It’s all very well to listen to what she preaches, but there is a fence between us.”
“What matters a mere fence?” demanded Ermanrich. “How can you even doubt her, Baldwin? Can’t you hear the truth in each word she utters?”
“How can we truly see how sincere she is if we can’t see her face except through a knothole? What if she has been set here as a test for us?”
“A test, indeed,” murmured Sigfrid, voice muffled by his clenched hands pressed against his lips. Head bent, he had his eyes shut tight and seemed to be grimacing.
Ever since Tallia had come to Quedlinhame, ever since she began speaking in her monotonously fervid voice about the Redemptio of the blessed Daisan, of his death and rebirth, poor Sigfrid seemed engaged in an inner struggle which caused him much pain.
The four boys were not her only audience. Each afternoon just after the office of Vespers she walked barefoot out from under the colonnade to the fence that separated the girls’ side of the novitiary from the boys’ half. Each day for the last three months, no matter how awful the weather, she knelt, covered only by her novice’s drab brown robe, and prayed. Only a few prayed with her every day. One of these was Ermanrich, who knelt on the opposite side of the fence, shivering in snow, in sleet, in gusty winds, in the heavy chill of winter’s hard breath, to hear her speak. Some of the female novices did as well, among them Ermanrich’s cousin, Hathumod.
Baldwin and Ivar came to listen on those days when it wasn’t too much of a hardship. Many of the female novices collected on those pleasanter days as well, or so the boys assumed by the weighty sense of many breaths drawn and released in time to Lady Tallia’s testimony, by the rustling and murmuring of coarse robes, by the whispers of light voices and, now and again, a giggle. But the giggling was never directed toward Tallia’s words. No one ever laughed at Lady Tallia or her heretical preaching.
Lady Tallia never raised her voice. She never traded on her high position, unlike Duchess Rotrudis’ son Reginar, nor did she expect to be deferred to or made much of. Quite the contrary.
Her privations had become legendary among the novices. She never wore shoes, not even in the winter. Her diet consisted wholly of barley bread and beans. She never drank wine, not even on feast days. She never allowed a stovepot by her bed, no matter how cold it became, and she allowed no servant to wait upon her, as the other noble girls did, but rather insisted—when her aunt Scholastica allowed it—on serving the servants as if she were the commoner born and they the noble.
There even circulated a rumor that she had worn a hair-shirt under her robe until Mother Scholastica forbade her to indulge herself in such a prideful display of humility.
“Hsst!” said Baldwin. On his knees, face pressed up against the knothole, he peered through onto that which was forbidden them. “Here she comes.”
Ivar sank to his knees. The cold ground burned a chill into his skin through the fabric of his robe, and he wondered if he should go back inside. But inside sat Master Pursed-Lips, snoring by the stovepot, or Lord Reginar and his dogs, hoping to make life miserable for anyone who disturbed them while they diced. The second-year novices, led by Reginar, always diced just before Vespers, the only time during the day when novices were allowed a short period without occupation.
Only at this time did Tallia have opportunity—and privacy—to speak.
“Then why is it,” whispered Baldwin, turning away from the fence to let Ermanrich press nose and eye up against the knothole, “—if she speaks the truth—that she doesn’t testify in front of Mother Scholastica?” Like most handsome and favored children, Baldwin nurtured a blithe assurance that the adults in charge would bow before any reasonable, or passionately felt, request.
“Why didn’t you just tell your parents you had no liking for the noblewoman who wanted to marry you instead of claiming you had a vocation to the church?” said Ivar.
Baldwin’s beautiful eyes flared. “That wouldn’t have mattered! You know as well as I that liking matters not when it comes time for one family to ally itself with another. Especially for the family which seeks advantage in the match.”
“You’re too skeptical, Baldwin,” said Ermanrich.
“About marriage or Lady Tallia?” Baldwin retorted.
Sigfrid took his turn. As the female novices on the other side settled down with a rustling of cloth and several coughs and sniffles, he leaned back to speak. “Of course she would be condemned by Mother Scholastica and the other authorities if they heard her speaking such heresy!”
“Hush,” said Ermanrich. “I can’t hear her.”
Sigfrid moved aside and let Ivar take his turn at the knothole. Ivar squinted, seeing first a wash of faces and fabric blended together as his sight adjusted. Like the twelve virtues, virgins all, in The Shepherd of Hermas, the female novices and even the meek schoolmistress had gathered around Tallia to listen. Ivar matched faces with virtues. Tallia for Faith, of course; Hathumod for Simplicity; the elderly and mild schoolmistress for Concordia. The rest—unremarkable girls with their hair covered by shawls and with noses red, or white, from cold and their pale hands clasped devoutly before them—would do for Abstinence, Patience, Magnanimity, Innocence, Charity, Discipline, Truth, and Prudence. Of them all, only Tallia had a truly interesting face, drawn to a fine pallor by her austerities. But perhaps it was only her tinge of fanaticism that lent attraction to her. She had nothing of Liath’s warm beauty, but she was the only truly enticing object Ivar had seen at Quedlinhame since Liath had departed with the king’s progress.
“Death is the cause of life,” she was saying now. “By sacrificing the blessed Daisan in that ritual by which the Dariyans flayed the skin from the body of a living man, the empress relieved Him of His earthly clothing. So was He freed forever from His body, which He would not need in the Chamber of Light.”
“But why did he have to be killed like that?” demanded one of the girls. “Didn’t he suf
fer?”
“He already suffered by the measure of our sins.” Tallia lifted her hands and turned them palms up to display to her audience. “This is mere skin, molded from clay, nothing more than that. Like all else outside the Chamber of Light, it is tainted with darkness. We do not return to God in the flesh but rather in the spirit. It is our soul that ascends through the spheres to the Chamber of Light.”
“But then how could the blessed Daisan have come back to the earth and walked among his disciplas again, as you say, if he didn’t have a body?”
“Is there any power God does not have? She gave us birth. She gave birth to the universe—Ah!” Tallia gasped, swaying, and Hathumod, as stout a young woman as her cousin was a young man, held her up so she did not fall. “Lady bless!” said Tallia in an altered voice, high and breathless and yet somehow piercing. “I see a light like the blinding glance of angels. It penetrates the haze of mist that envelops the dull earth.” Head lolling back, Tallia appeared to faint.
Ivar jerked back from the fence to find Baldwin, Ermanrich, and Sigfrid clustered at his shoulder, pressing him back into the rough wood.
“What happened?” demanded Ermanrich.
The bells rang for Vespers and the four young men scrambled up guiltily to take their place in line.
Ivar braved Master Pursed-Lip’s willow switch to get a good look at the line of female novices as they proceeded into the church, but he did not see Lady Tallia among their number … and she never, ever, missed a chance to pray.
Nor did she appear before Vespers at her usual place the next day.
It took two days for Ermanrich to arrange a private rendezvous with his cousin, and then the news he had to report hit all four boys with horror.
“Hathumod says Tallia has been stricken with a paralysis.”