Prince of Dogs

by Kate Elliott

  Lavastine questioned her closely about the lay of the city, the land thereabouts, the approaches from the west, from the north and south, which she knew little about, and from the east, which she had never seen. He asked her about the river, how close the city lay to the river’s mouth, how the island on which the city lay was situated, how the bridges gapped the water and in what manner the gates and walls stood in reference to roadway and shoreline.

  “This tunnel,” he said. “The farmer claimed the cave ended in a wall.”

  “So he did, my lord count. I have no reason to disbelieve him. It was a miracle that anyone survived or that the tunnel appeared.”

  “But a tunnel did appear,” said Lavastine.

  “And you survived,” said the young lord, and blushed.

  His father glanced sharply at him, frowned, and then played absently with the ears of the hound that lounged at his feet. “Dhuoda,” he said to the woman seated to his left, the only other person so honored in the chamber. “Can you be without so many men for another summer’s season? If we leave after sowing, I don’t know if we can return by harvest.”

  “Much depends on the weather,” she said. “But despite everything, last year’s harvest was decent and this winter has been mild. It could be done if you muster after the Feast of St. Sormas … if you think it worthwhile.”

  “The king’s favor and a just reward.” Both he and the noblewoman looked at the young man. “Eagle, where is Lord Geoffrey?”

  “Lord Geoffrey remained behind to hunt with the king. He will follow later and will meet you here by the time you muster your troops.”

  “Was the king so certain I would agree?”

  “He said, my lord count, that he would grant you the reward you asked for.”

  The young Lord had the propensity to blush a fierce red. He did so now. Liath could not imagine why. But at this moment she did not much care about the embarrassments of the nobly born. She only wanted to stand in this room, to shelter in this safe hall, for the rest of her life.

  “Tallia!” said Lavastine in the tone of a man who has scented victory. “He will give us Tallia.” He stood. “Let it be done. Eagle, you will return to the king to let him know that I hereby pledge to free Gent from the Eika.”

  4

  HE climbs upward on the old path through a forest of spruce, pine, and birch. Soon the forest fades to birch only and at last even these stunted trees fall away as he emerges onto the fjall, the high plateau, home of the WiseMothers. The wind blows fiercely at this height, whipping his ice-white hair. A rime of frost covers the ground.

  The OldMother, who is both his mother and his aunt, sent him here. “Speak to them, restless one,” she said. “Their words are wiser than mine.”

  He finds the youngest of the WiseMothers still on the trail, her great bulk easing upward toward her place with the others. He sees them now in the distance like stout pillars surrounding a hollow burnished to a bright glare by the glittering threads that mark the spawning net of ice-wyrms. But he does not mean to brave the ice-wyrms’ venomous sting this day.

  Instead he stops beside the youngest of them, who has not yet reached their council ground. Although she passed the knife of decision to his OldMother before his hatching, it has taken her these many years to get as far as a morning’s hard walk for him. But she, like her mothers and mothers’ mothers before her, grew from that same substance that carves the bones of the earth. She has no reason to move swiftly in the world: She will see many more seasons than he can ever hope to, and long after her bones have hardened completely, her thoughts will still walk the paths of earth until, at last, she departs utterly to the fjall of the heavens.

  He kneels before her, brings her in offering nothing durable or hard, only those things made precious by their fragility and transience: a tiny flower once sheltered in the lee of a rock; a lock of downy hair from one of the Soft Ones’ infants which just died last night; the remains of an eggshell from Hakonin fjord; the delicate bone of a small bird such as a priest would carve marks into and with its fellows scatter onto stone to read the footprints of the future.

  “WiseMother,” he says. “Hear my words. Give me an answer to my question.” Having spoken, he waits. One must have patience to converse with the WiseMothers and not just because of the ice-wyrms.

  Her progress up the path is so slow he cannot actually see her forward movement, but were he to come in another week, the lichen-striped boulder that lies beside the tread of her great hooves would be a finger’s span behind. In that same way they hear and they speak to a measure of years far longer than his own. Perhaps, indeed, once they are no longer bound to the world of the tribe by the knife, it is actually hard for them to understand the words of their grandsons who speak and move so swiftly and live so short a time, not more than forty circuits of the sun.

  Her voice rumbles so low, like the lowest pitch in the distant fall of an avalanche, that he must strain to hear her. “Speak. Child.”

  “OldMother heard from the southlands. Bloodheart calls an army together, all the RockChildren who will come to him, to campaign against the Soft Ones. If I take such ships as I have gathered and sail south when the wind turns, will I still be in disgrace? Is it better to remain here, risking little, or sail there, risking much?”

  The wind blusters along the rocky plateau. Rocks adorn the land, the only ornament needed to make of it a fitting chamber for the wisdom of the eldest Mothers—all but the FirstMothers, who vanished long ago. Below, trees shush and murmur, a host of voices in the constant wind. It begins, gently, to snow. With the thaw will come spring rains, and then the way will lie open to sail south.

  Her voice resonates even through the earth beneath his knees, though it is faint to his ears. “Let. Be. Your. Guide. That. Which. Appears. First. To. Your. Eyes.”

  His copper-skinned hand still lies over her rough one. He feels a sharp tingling, like lightning striking nearby, and withdraws his hand at once. The offerings he has laid upon her upturned hand melt and soak into her skin as honey seeps into sodden earth, slowly but inexorably. The audience is over.

  He rises obediently. She has answered, so there is no need to walk the rest of the way up the fjall, into the teeth of the wind, to kneel before the others by the hollow where all come to rest in the fullness of time.

  He turns his back on the wind and walks down through the sullen green and white of the winter forest. Below the trees he walks through pastureland, the steadings of his brothers and oldest uncles, the pens of their slaves. All this is familiar to his eyes; he has seen it many times before: the sheep and goats huddling in the winter cold, scraping beneath the snow to find fodder; cows crowded into the byres, fenced away from the dogs; the pigs scurrying away to the shelter of trees; the slaves in their miserable pens.

  But as he comes up behind his own steading, newly built from sod and timber, he sees a strange procession wind away into the trees. Silent, he follows. It is a small group of slaves, six of them; one carries a tiny bundle wrapped in precious cloth. They are hard to tell apart, but two he can recognize even from a distance: the male named Otto and the female-priest named Ursuline. These two have become like chieftain and OldMother to the other Soft Ones he keeps as slaves; over the winter he has observed their actions among the others, forming them into a tribe, and it interests him. As this interests him.

  A clearing lies in the trees. Certain markers of stone, crudely carved, are set upright into the soil. It is a slave place, and he leaves it alone as do all the RockChildren. Slaves have their customs, however useless they may be. Now, he sees what they are about. They have dug a hole in the ground and into the earth they place the body of the infant that died in the night. The female-priest sings in her thin voice while the others weep. He has tasted the tears of the Soft Ones: They are salt, like the ocean waters. Is it possible that their Circle god has taught them something of the true life of the universe? Why else would they cover their dead ones in earth even as they leak water onto t
he dirt? Is this what they give in offering? He does not know.

  But he watches. Is this event the one he must use as his guide? What does the funeral presage? His own death if he returns to his father’s army? Or the death of the Soft Ones whom Bloodheart will attack?

  Risk much or risk little.

  In the end, staring through the branches at the small mourning party, he knows he always knew the answer to his question. He is too restless to stay. Death is only a change in existence; it is neither ending nor beginning, no matter what these Soft Ones may think. He will return to Hundse, to Gent.

  The mourners file past him on the narrow track. One of them, a young female with hollow eyes and a body frailer than most, still cries her salt tears though the others attempt to soothe her. Did the infant come from her body? And if so, how was it planted there? Are they the same as the beasts, who also plant their young in and feed them out of the mother’s body? But though the Soft Ones resemble brute animals, he thinks it cannot be completely true. They speak, as people do. They gaze above themselves into the fjall of the heavens and wonder what has brought them to walk on the earth. This, also, true people do. And they do something he has seen no other creature, not RockChildren, not animal, not the small cousins of the earth nor the fell beasts of the ocean water, do.

  They weep.

  Alain woke to the profound silence of Lavas stronghold asleep in the dark and cold of a late winter’s night. But a tickle nagged at him, like a hound scratching at the door. Rage slumbered on. As he rose, Sorrow whuffed softly and clattered to his feet, following him. The other hounds lay curled here and there on the carpet or near the bed. Terror lay atop Lavastine’s feet, the two of them snoring softly together, in concert. Alain slipped on a tunic. He had heard something, or perhaps it was only the residue of his dream.

  He latched the door carefully behind him and placed a hand on Sorrow’s muzzle. It was cold in the hall and cold on the stairs. A draft leaked up the stone stairwell, a breath of warmth from the hall. He followed its scent and at last, beneath the breathing silence of hall and stone, heard what he was listening for: the sound of weeping.

  It was so soft that he only found its source when he was halfway into the hall, attracted by the red glow of hearth fire. In the alcoves, servants and men-at-arms slept; others would have returned to their own huts outside the palisade or down in the village. But a single heaped shape more like a forgotten bundle of laundry lay by the fire, shuddering.

  The Eagle wept alone on her rough pallet by the fire.

  Sorrow whined nervously.

  “Sit!” Alain whispered, leaving the hound sitting in the middle of the floor with his tail thumping in the rushes. He approached the Eagle.

  She did not notice him until he was almost upon her. Then, gasping aloud, she choked on a sob, started up, and reached for a stick in the fire.

  “Hush,” he said. “Don’t be scared. It’s only me. Alain. Don’t burn yourself.”

  “Oh, God,” she murmured, but she drew her hand away from the fire and used it to wipe her nose instead. He could not make out much of her face, but he could smell the salt of her tears in the smoky air.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked.

  “Ai, Lady,” she whispered. “It wasn’t so bad, riding away. But now I must go back.”

  “Go back where?”

  She shook her head, trying now to dry her tears, but they still came despite her wish. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters!”

  She was silent for so long that he began to think he would have to speak, or that he had somehow offended her.

  “Why should it matter to you?” she asked at last, haltingly.

  “It should matter to every one of us when we see one of our kinsfolk lost in sorrow.”

  “We are not kin, you and I.” The words came choked from her mouth. “I have no kin.”

  “We are all the sons and daughters of God. Isn’t that kinship enough?”

  “I—I don’t know.” She stirred restlessly and held out her hands toward the coals to warm them. Reflexively, he fetched some sticks from the woodpile just inside the door and fed the fire. She watched him, still silent.

  “You don’t want to go back,” he said, settling beside her and pulling his knees up to his chest. Sorrow whined softly but kept his distance. “I saw you,” he added, “when you rode in from Gent, when the king was in Autun. You and the other Eagle. I don’t know his name.”

  “Wolfhere.”

  “Aren’t Eagles your kin?”

  “In a way.”

  “You’ve really no one at all?”

  “My mother died about ten years ago. And Da is dead.” How bitter this admission came he could hear in the tight rein she held on her voice. “Ai, Lady, almost two years ago now. He was all I had.”

  “And I was granted a wealth of fathers,” he said, suddenly struck by how great his good fortune had been.

  “How can you have a wealth of fathers? How can you have more than one?”

  He hung his head, shamed to think with what anger he had left Merchant Henri at their last meeting, how badly he had behaved. Would Henri ever forgive him for that pride and anger? “I was fostered to one, a good man, and grew up calling him ‘Father.’ I came lately to the second.”

  “Oh, yes.” She turned toward him, expression almost visible in the darkness. “King Henry granted Count Lavastine the right to name you as his heir. Isn’t that right?”

  “And I only a bastard before,” he said lightly, but even so, and even though Lavastine’s soldiers and servants had now accepted him, the memory of their visit to the manor of Lady Aldegund and Lord Geoffrey still stung.

  “Who was your mother?” she asked, then said, embarrassed, “I beg your pardon, my lord. I’ve no right to ask such a thing.”

  “No, no, I asked you questions. You may ask me questions in my turn. She was a servingwoman here, gotten with child by my father and put aside when he married.”

  “That story has been told before,” she said sharply. “Noble lords never ask if their attentions are welcome. That is the last thing they think of.” Then, while he was still so astonished by this accusation that he could only blink, eyes tearing from the smoke, she huddled away from him, cowering as if she expected to be hit. “I beg your pardon. I meant no such thing. Forgive me.”

  But he could only gape, struck so hard by this new and unwelcome notion that it was only when a flea crawled up his ankle from the rushes matting the floor that he came to himself, scratching it off. “It never occurred to me,” he said, ashamed now. “Perhaps she loved him, too—it’s possible—or wanted something from him. But maybe she never cared for him at all and had no choice—” Hard on this thought, another flashed before him in all its brilliance. “Is there a noble lord on the progress who torments you in this way? Isn’t there anything the king or the other Eagles can do to stop it?”

  “Ai, Lady,” she whispered, and because she began to cry again, he knew his guess was right. “There’s nothing Eagles can do. And nothing the king will do, for he’s cleverer than the king and all the lords and ladies at court. They can’t see him but only what he lays before them to see. There is no one to aid me in any case. He is the son of a margrave. I have no one to protect me!”

  “I will protect you,” said Alain. “I am heir to the county of Lavas, after all. That counts for something.”

  Suddenly she clutched his hands. Though the air was cold, her skin was hot. “I pray you, my lord, if you can do anything, if you can make it possible for me to stay here—to send someone else in my place back to the king’s progress….”

  “Then what?” asked Alain, amazed by the intensity in her voice. “Is this noble lord so loathsome to you?”

  She let go of him at once. “You don’t understand,” she said fiercely. “I have no kin, only the Eagles. Even if I had any fondness for this man—which I do not!—if I became his concubine I would be cast out of the Eagles. Then where would I be i
f he tired of me? I wouldn’t even have the protection of the Eagles. God help me, it doesn’t matter. He’ll never tire of me. He’ll never let me alone.”

  He was afraid she was going to start weeping again. The confident Eagle he had seen on the road this morning seemed a distant memory now. She was all tears and fear. “What you’re saying doesn’t make sense! First you say you fear he will cast you off, and then you say you fear he’ll never do so. It must be one or the other, surely, and in truth, my friend, I think you are right to fear the first more. If he favors you for a few years until he finds another younger, prettier woman, then you are kinless and without support when he puts you aside. If he never puts you aside, then surely you will live in good circumstances for the rest of your life, and any children you have by him will be well provided for.”

  At that, she began half to cry and half to snort with laughter. Had she gone mad? “You sound like Mistress Birta. Always calculating what is most practical.”

  “That’s what my Aunt Bel—the woman who raised me—taught me. No use worrying about the fox stealing the chickens when the henhouse is safely locked and it’s your house that’s burning down.”

  Her sobs and laughter subsided into hiccuping chuckles. “That sounds like something Da would say. But you don’t understand. You can’t understand. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to have disturbed your rest this night.”

  “I want to understand!” he said, angry that she would think he didn’t care. He sought and found her hands where she had wrapped them in an end of her cloak. “There is so much fear in you, Liath. What are you running from?” He leaned forward without thinking and kissed her on the forehead. A few stray ends of her hair tickled his nose. Her entire body stiffened and at once he dropped her hands and leaned back. Sorrow, behind them, growled softly and scrabbled forward, but not too much, not too close.