In the Ruins (10 page)

She smiled sleepily, remembering the pigs: Hib, Nib, Jib, Bib, Gib, Rib, Tib, and the sow, Trotter. Silly names. It seemed so long ago. She conjured Hugh in her mind, but he did not frighten her. All that fear and pain was part of her now, woven into her bones and heart in the same manner as her mother’s substance. It did not make her less than she was. The streaming waters cut a channel in the earth that humankind named a river, and each winter and flooding spring that channel might shift and alter, but the river remained itself.

She dreamed.

The aether had once been like a river, pouring from the heavens into Earth along that deep channel linking Earth to Ashioi country adrift in the heavens. But now that channel lies breached, buried, and broken, and the aether flows instead as a thousand rivulets, spreading everywhere, penetrating all things but as the barest trickle.

She walks along a stream of silver that flows through the grasslands, but there is no one waiting for her, only the remains of the Horse people’s battered camp and a few hastily dug graves.

Morning came with no sunrise, a lightening so diffuse that it wasn’t clear it came from the east at all. It was quiet, not a breath of wind. A branch snapped, the sound so loud she scrambled to her feet just as the silver male called a challenge. A half dozen men appeared at the other side of the clearing, carrying staves and spears. They had the disreputable and desperate appearance of bandits. They stared at her for a long time, measuring what she offered and what danger she posed. She held her bow tight, but she had no arrows. Her quiver had burned away like all the rest, even her good friend, Lucian’s sword.

At last, one stepped forward from the rest and placed his weapon on the ground. He spoke in a dialect of Dariyan, the local speech. She could follow the gist of it. “Are you angel or demon? Whence are you come?”

“I am as you see me,” she answered boldly. “No more, and no less.”

“Has God sent you? Can you help us?”

“What manner of help do you need?” They were desperate, certainly, but as she studied their callused hands and seamed, anxious faces, she realized they were farmers.

“We have lost our village,” said the spokesman. “Our houses torn down by the wind. A lord with soldiers came by then, three days past. He took what stores we held by us. Now we have nothing to eat. We could not fight. They had weapons.”

The spears were only sharpened sticks, and the staves were branches scavenged out of the forest. One had a shovel. Another carried a scythe.

“Be strong,” she called, knowing how foolish the words sounded, but she had nothing to give them.

“Whuff!” coughed the female, rising, and the men scattered into the trees.

“Let’s go.” Better the pain in her shoulders than the knife of helplessness held to her throat. Whose army had stolen their grain? She hoped it was not Sanglant’s.

It took the griffin two tries to get enough lift to get up over the trees, and if the clearing hadn’t been so broad they wouldn’t have accomplished it at all. They made less distance this day but still far more than she could have walked. As the afternoon waned, more a change in the composition of the light than anything, they came to earth on a wide hillside better suited for the griffin’s size. The silver male had fallen behind and at length appeared with a deer in his claws.

She had nothing to cut with and so waited until she could pick up the scraps left by their ripping and tearing. She gathered twigs and fallen branches and stones and dug a fire pit with her hands as well as she could. To call fire into dry kindling took only a moment’s concentration: seek fire deep within the parched sticks and—there!—flames licked up from the inner pile, neatly stacked in squares to give the fire air to feed on. The scraps of meat cooked quickly skewered on a stick, and she ate with juice dribbling down her chin.

The griffins settled away from the fire, too nervous to doze. She licked her fingers and studied the darkening sky. The cloud cover made it difficult to gauge sunset.

Sanglant. Blessing. Hanna. Sorgatani. Hathui. Ivar. Heribert. Li’at’dano. Even Hugh. She sought them in the fire with her Eagle’s Sight, but all she saw was a crackling blur of flames and shadow.

“REFUGEES,” said Fulk as he reined in beside Sanglant where the regnant rode in the vanguard of the army.

They had begun the climb into the foothills through dreary weather with scarcely a drop of rain and not a single glimpse of the sun. They had lost a hundred horses in the last ten days and still had the crossing over the mountains ahead of them with winter coming on. It had, at least, been unusually warm, but in the past two days the bite of winter had strengthened.

Fulk indicated a trail that led off the road into a hollow where some twoscore desperate travelers had taken shelter under wagons and canvas lean-tos against evening’s approaching dark.

“I know this place,” said Sanglant. “This is where we found those men with their throats cut, after the galla attacked us.”

“Indeed, Your Majesty. I see no sign of the massacre now. It’s a good camping spot. Do we stop here for the night? These folk may ask for food and water and we haven’t any to spare.”

“The Aostan lords are shortsighted,” remarked Sanglant. “Every village we passed has already been looted. If there is no one to till the fields because the farmers have all died of starvation, if there is no seed grain, they will not be able to feed their war bands. So be it. We’ll camp here.”

Sanglant urged Fest forward and with Fulk, Hathui, and a dozen of his personal guard at his back he rode into the hollow. He feared no violence. They could not kill him, and in any case it was obvious that these ragged fugitives posed no danger to an armed man. They hadn’t even posted a sentry, only thrown themselves to the ground in exhaustion.

Hearing horses and the noise of men’s voices, the refugees staggered up, huddling in groups of two and three.

“Who are you?” he asked.

When they heard him speak, half fell to their knees and the rest wept.

“Is it possible?” asked one middle-aged man, creeping forward on his knees with arms outstretched in the manner of a supplicant. “You speak Wendish.”

“We are Wendish,” he began, but a woman in cleric’s robes hissed sharply and tugged on the first man’s sleeve.

“It is Prince Sanglant, Vindicadus. Look! There is the banner of Fesse!”

“Who are you?” he asked again, not dismounting.

The one called Vindicadus rose as others urged him forward. It was a strange group, only adults in their prime and youths. There was one suckling infant in arms, no young children, and no elderly. Under the dirt they were sturdily and even well clothed, and several by their robes he identified as clerics.

“We are Wendish folk, my lord. We are those from King Henry’s progress who were left behind in Darre because we belong to the households of clerics and presbyters.”

“Why are you here now?”

In their silence, their hesitation, their indrawn breaths, he heard an answer. Some looked away. Some sobbed. A pair of servants clung to the sides of a hand-cart
on which a man lay curled, hands in fists, eyes shut. He was dressed in the torn and stained robes of a presbyter. There was blood in his hair, long dried to a stiff coppery coating.

“They attacked us, my lord,” said the one called Vindicadus at last. “Because we were Wendish. They said we had angered God by our presumption. They said we had caused the storm of God’s punishment. We are all that remains of those of Wendish birth and breeding who served in the palaces in Darre. Our companions were slaughtered that day, or died on the way. I pray you, my lord, do not abandon us.”

“Who attacked you?”

“Everyone, my lord.” He wept. “The Aostans. The people of Darre. The city took terrible damage in the winds and the tremors that followed. Fissures belch gas out of the earth. Toward the coast, fire and rock blasted up from the Abyss and destroyed everything it touched. At least three mountains spew fire all along the western coast. It is the end of the world, my lord. What else can it be?”

“True words,” murmured Hathui.

“Will you help us, my lord? We are unknown to you, but many of us served in King Henry’s schola.”

“You are dressed in frater’s garb. Are you such a one?”

“Nay, my lord. I am a lowly servingman from Austra, once bound to the service of Margrave Judith but later coming into the service of her magnanimous son, Presbyter Hugh.”

Sanglant felt a kick up inside his ribs. Hathui looked at him sharply, as though he had given something away, and maybe he had. She knew Liath’s history as well as he did. “You served Lord Hugh?”

“I did, my lord. Of his schola and retinue, six remain. The others are dead—” He choked on the word and for the space of five breaths could not go on. Sanglant waited, hearing the army toiling up the road just beyond the low ridge that separated the hollow from the main path. “They are dead.” He was not an old man but he had seen better days; grief made him fragile. “The rest went north months ago with the presbyter.”

“Hugh went north? When was this?”

“Months ago, my lord. In the month of … aye, let me see. It seems years ago. I don’t recall now. It was late summer. Yes, that’s right.”

“Wise of him to avoid the disaster,” muttered Sanglant.

“He might be dead, Your Majesty,” said Hathui.

“So we can wish, but I must assume the worst.” He glanced at her while the refugees waited. She raised an eyebrow, a gesture so slight that it shouldn’t have hit him so hard. “Not just because of Liath! He is the one who seduced Adelheid to trust him. The one who ensorcelled my father. He is ambitious, and he has reached the end of his rope.”

“Queen Adelheid was not a fool. She was ambitious in her own right. It might be she who seduced Hugh to dream of power beyond what he had otherwise hoped for.”

He snorted. “Do you think so, Hathui?”

“Nay. Only that they found a ready ally, each in the other.”

“Did he bed her?”

“I believe she was faithful to your father. She admired and respected Henry.”

“I am glad to hear it. Although surely, if that is true, it makes her actions harder to understand.”

“They have two children, Your Majesty. What mother does not seek advancement for her beloved children? Presbyter Hugh achieved his high position because of his mother’s devoted affection.”

“True enough. Margrave Judith was no fool except in her love for him.”

One of the clerics limped out of the crowd and whispered into Vindicadus’ ear, then shoved him, pressuring him forward.

“My lord. I beg you. What news of the king? I know—we knew—you rebelled against him.”

“My father is dead.”

They cried out loud at that. He heard their whispers:
Murderer. Patricide
.

“Your Majesty,” said Fulk in loud voice. “Here comes Duchess Liutgard.”

Her mount picked its way down the slope. Her banner bearer rode to her left and her favored steward to her right. She gasped when she saw the refugees. Her face grew even whiter. Seven of them ran forward and flung themselves into the dirt before her, careful of the hooves of her horse, but she dismounted and tossed the reins to her steward before walking in amongst them and taking their hands, calling them by name.

“How has this happened? Why are you here?” she demanded.

They spoke all at once, words tumbling each over those of the others. “… blast of wind … rumblings, then a terrible quake … fire in the sky … glowing rock, flowing everywhere.

“Riots. A storming of the palace. Flight through the ruined streets.

“All is chaos, my lady,” wept the eldest, who was not more than forty. “I am called Elsebet, a cleric in Emperor Henry’s schola. We lost half of our number in the first day, and half again as many in our trek here. We dared not attempt the Julier Pass. This one, Brother Vindicadus, was once in the service of Presbyter Hugh and before him Margrave Judith. He knew of an eastern pass that was little traveled. You see what remains of the king’s schola. We lost so many. Is it true? Is it true the regnant—the emperor—is dead?”

“Henry is dead,” said Liutgard as she looked at Sanglant. “That we are any of us living now is due to my cousin, Sanglant. Henry named him as heir as he was dying. It was—” Her voice broke, but she went on. “It was the wish of his heart to see Prince Sanglant become regnant after him. Henry was not himself at the end, not for the last two or three years. He was ensorcelled by his queen and by Presbyter Hugh. It was Sanglant who freed him from their net. Hear me!” Her voice rang out above the murmurs. “It is true. I swear it on my mother’s and father’s graves. I swear it by the Hand of the Lord and Lady. Sanglant is regnant now over Wendar and Varre. He is the one we follow. He is leading us home.”

“We’ll set up camp here for the night,” said Sanglant quietly to Fulk. “We must make room for these.”

“We haven’t enough to feed them, Your Majesty.”

“We cannot abandon them. They are our countryfolk. If I cannot save them, then who will?”

Fulk nodded, and left to give the orders.

They settled down to camp in marching order as dusk crept over them. Every man and woman slept fully clothed and with weapons beside him, although many put off their mail. The horses were rubbed down, watered, and fed; it was their good luck to find an unpolluted stream close by. With Lewenhardt, Surly, and a limping Sibold in attendance, Sanglant walked down through the line of march, pausing to speak to many of the soldiers, and fetched up at last with the rear guard.