In the Ruins (16 page)

“Martin!” she called, and Martin looked up at the sound of her voice and grinned at her. What they shared, Ivar felt as a joyful presence, like the perfume of the first meadow flowers of spring, that penetrated even in this dank and fetid winter hall. The hall had stood up to the gale; the presence glimpsed in their shared gaze had withstood the storms of life. “This one is a cleric! Maybe he could give us God’s blessing on our marriage.”

“Surely we have God’s blessing already,” said Martin as the child ran over to him and leaped up into his arms, cuddling there.

“Hush!” She made a sign with her hands, and spat, and then looked embarrassed. “Begging your pardon, my lord cleric. Old ways die hard. I mean nothing by it. But it’s bad fortune to say what might attract the evil eye. Would you do it? We’ve nothing to offer but a place to sleep and something to eat and drink for as long as you must bide here until your companion is healed and you can go on. And these unnatural rains end. Can you speak God’s blessing over us? We’ve
been handfasted these six or seven summers but never had God’s blessing spoken over us.”

I can’t
.

But as she stared at him, eyes wide and a hopeful smile on her lips, he could not say “no” to her. He didn’t know the words. He’d forgotten most things and learned little to begin with. He hadn’t paid attention because he hadn’t wanted to. He’d wanted everything else. Anything out of his reach had seemed so bright and ripe to him, like the perfect apple dangling from a branch too high to ever reach.

“I’ll sing God’s blessing over you,” he said, “in the morning.”

Ai! She was so happy as the rest stamped in and by lantern light stripped down to shifts and cozied into the pallets and platforms tucked up under the eaves that they slept on, all snugged together for warmth. They offered him an honored place close to the hearth, and he lay down beside Erkanwulf and the little lad, who had taken a liking to the rider, but although he closed his eyes, he could not sleep.

After a while Erkanwulf stirred, and whispered, “I’ve never heard you sing a blessing, not once in all this time. You’re just a heretic, not a real churchman, aren’t you?”

“Is there any harm in it?” Ivar murmured. “I served as a novice at Quedlinhame. It isn’t as if a frater or cleric is likely to wander through here. Anyway, they’ve served us a good turn.”

Erkanwulf grunted softly. “I suppose there’s no harm in it. Funny, though. That one, called Martin, he came out of Gent years ago, so I hear. He was a lad then and he settled here and married a local girl. This is their boy.” The child was snoring softly on the other side of Erkanwulf. “The wee lad has never heard of Autun or Lady Sabella or Biscop Constance, but he knows all about Gent and roads east.” His voice got rough, or perhaps his leg was paining him. “What will we do? We’ve only one horse now. You know as well as I do that we’ve nothing but empty promises to carry back to Biscop Constance.”

“Let me think. Something strange is abroad in the world, don’t you suppose? That wind … it sounded liked the cry of a living soul. Made me shiver right down through my skin. It made me think of a verse from the Holy Book, only I can’t remember it right, something about the seas boiling and the wind tossing down trees.”

Erkanwulf snorted. “Every deacon and cleric and frater I’ve ever met has a better memory than you, Lord Ivar, most noble cleric.”

He spoke mockingly, but the words didn’t sting. It was Erkanwulf’s way to tease. A year ago, a month ago, Ivar would have stewed and simmered, turning those words over and over, but not now.

“The verses spoke of the end of the world,” he said instead. “I feel we have been touched by a terrible, grand sword, a weapon wielded by God, or by those among humankind who don’t fear what they should fear. Did you ever see trees fall so? Like sticks kicked over by a boy!”

“I did not. Never in my life, and I’ve stood in forests when the wind howled on winter nights. I thought I would piss myself, I was so scared.”

Rain still drummed on the thatch roof of the hall, steady and ominous.

“That’s right,” agreed Ivar. “It wasn’t natural. Nor were those shades we saw before either. We have to keep our eyes open and be ready to act. We have to get back to Biscop Constance no matter what. And go quickly, as soon as the weather breaks.”

But in the morning, it rained. In the afternoon, it rained. All the next night, it rained. For five days it rained without letting up. The villagers kept busy with many tasks around the long hall and within the warren of huts and hovels and sheds they had erected within their log palisade. They ate the froth meat out of the horse in a series of soups that stretched the meat so that it would feed the two dozen or so folk across several days. Every evening as the light faded they gathered around the hearth fire and demanded Erkanwulf tell them the tale of Gent, or that Ivar regale them with the story of the ill-fated expedition east into the marchlands under the command of Princess Sapientia and Prince Bayan of Ungria.

“Look here, I pray you, my lord cleric,” said Martin late on the sixth day after he’d come in from outside. He stank of smoke. He’d been curing horse meat. He rummaged in a chest and brought out a parchment tied with a strip of leather. This he rolled out on the table. Folk crowded around, whispering as they stared at the writing none of them could read. “It’s our charter! From the king himself, may God bless him and his kin. Do you see the seal here?” He touched the wax seal reverentially. “We just heard it the once, read by that Eagle that rode through here, the one with a dark face. She had to take it away so it could get the king’s seal. Another Eagle, a red-haired one like to you, rode through a year or so after and brought it back to us. But he couldn’t read. Can you read it for us, so we can hear it again?”

How they all gazed at him with hopeful expressions! They were such a sturdy group, healthier than many because the forest provided so much, all but a steady supply of grain and salt which, they’d told him, they traded for. Even in lean years they could survive with less grain. They hadn’t any horses, but three milk cows. They had forage for their goats and sheep as well as certain plants and tubers out of the forest that could be eaten by humankind in hard times even if they weren’t tasty. They ate meat often, and they were proud of it, knowing that folk beyond the forest never fared so well.

He bent over the diploma. The lantern light made the pen strokes waver. He’d never read well nor did he like to, but the months in Queen’s Grave and the unrelenting supervision of Biscop Constance had forced him to labor over Dariyan, the language used both by the church and by the king’s schola for all decrees and capitularies.

They waited, so quiet that the sound of dripping rain off the outside eaves made him nervous. He kept expecting the rain to start up again. Luckily, it was not a long document. He stumbled through it without utterly shaming himself. King Henry’s promise was straightforward: the foresters would be free of service to any lord or lady as long as they kept the king’s road passable for himself and his servants and messengers and armies.

“The Eagle read it better,” murmured Martin’s wife to her husband, then blushed when Ivar looked at her.

“Eagles can’t read,” he said. “They learn the words in their head and repeat them back. That’s what she must have done.”

“Nay, she read it all right,” said one of the older men. “I recall that well enough. She touched each word as she spoke it. How could she know which was which if she weren’t reading? Strange looking girl, too, not any older than my Baltia here.” He set a hand on the head of an adolescent girl perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age. “I don’t know if she were pretty, but she sure caught the eye.”

“She was at Gent, too,” said Martin. “She was the one what saved us, those of us who escaped.”

“I know who you mean!” said Erkanwulf from his seat on the bench. “We rode with her, Captain Ulric’s band out of Autun, that is. She was riding with Count Lavastine’s army, but she was a King’s Eagle, after all. I’d wager it was the same one.”

Ivar sat down, clenching his hands. He shut his eyes, and at once they fussed around him and Martin’s wife, called Flora, brought him ale to drink to clear his head.

“I will never be free of her.” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. He laughed, seeing them stare at him. Erkanwulf looked skeptical. Martin looked puzzled. Flora’s mouth had turned up softly, and her gaze was gentle, as though she had guessed it all. She touched her young husband on the shoulder, and he started, glanced at her, and reading something in her expression—words weren’t the only marks that could be read!—he rolled up the diploma and stashed it away in the chest beneath the community’s other precious possessions.

“You said you’d give us your blessing, Lord Ivar,” he said. “Will you do so?”

“I’ll do so.”

He rose. Old memories clung. They were a stink he would never be rid of. Liath had never been his, and she would never have chosen him.
She sure caught the eye
. He wasn’t the only man to have thought so. But it no longer
mattered. The world had changed in a way he did not yet understand.

“Stand before the hearth fire with clasped hands,” he said to Martin and Flora. He’d never witnessed a commoner’s wedding. Rarely did a deacon officiate in any case, since the law of bed and board made a marriage. He dredged for scraps of verse, God’s blessings for fecundity, the wedding of church and humankind as bride and groom, the necessity of holding fast to faith.

“For healthful seasons, for the abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times, let us pray. Have mercy upon us, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.”

Flora wept. Martin sobbed. Their son skipped around them in glee while the baby waved its chubby arms. Balt and his daughter broke out a flute and a fiddle, and the others took the table down and cleared a space for dancing. Erkanwulf tested his healing ankle by spinning Uta round and round, and he came back, laughing, to sit and rest and grimace.

“Don’t be so grim,” he said to Ivar. “Standing there with your arms crossed and a frown like my grandmam’s! Heh! She never smiled one day in her long life! My da used to say that a spell had been put on her when she was a young sprite that she’d drop dead if she was ever happy, so there you are. She was the oldest person I ever saw till the day she dropped dead.”

The story teased a grin out of him. “Was she smiling?”

“She was not! It wasn’t the curse that felled her. She got hit in the head by a piece of wood that flew free when one of my uncles was chopping up a log. A little like my poor horse, now I think on it.”

“Erkanwulf! How can you speak so disrespectfully of the dead?”

“She was a mean old bitch. That’s just how it was. No one was sorry to see her go except the dog.”

Like me
. But he shook himself. It was, a lie he told himself, and he didn’t know why. He had told himself that lie for years, ever after Hanna had chosen to go with Liath over him. But he had seen how false the lie was the day
Sigfrid, Ermanrich, and Hathumod had cried to see him risk his life for Biscop Constance. He had seen how false it was the day Baldwin had given up his freedom for the rest of them. He had seen how false it was the day Baldwin wept, believing him dead. Maybe Hanna, and Liath, had scorned him, but there were others who needed him. Who were waiting for him.

He grabbed Erkanwulf’s shoulder. “As soon as the road’s clear enough that the horse isn’t at risk, we’ll go.”

“If you wish,” agreed Erkanwulf. “You’ve got a strange look on your face. Has an imp gotten into you?”

“It’s time. We’ve got to act while we have the chance.”

“Time for what?”

“Time for Captain Ulric and all the men loyal to him to choose whether to act, or to give way. Princess Theophanu can’t help us. It’s up to us to free Biscop Constance. There’s only one way to do it.”

A burning wind struck with such ferocity that every tent in camp was laid flat. A hail of stinging ash passed over them where they huddled under whatever shelter they could find. After all this, after the rumbling and groaning of earth faded, the terrible glare of lightning gave way to a sickly gleam that Hanna at long last identified as dawn. She crawled out from under the wagon into the cloudy light of a new day in which everything had changed. She had taken shelter with Aurea, Teuda, and poor, addled Petra with her perpetually vacant expression.

“Stay there,” she whispered to the others. Their pale faces stared out at her.

“Do you see Sister Rosvita?” Aurea looked ready to scramble out, but Hanna waved her back.

“Stay there! You can’t imagine—just stay there.”

It was impossible to think such a day could ever dawn. It
was impossible to imagine a world that resembled the one she surveyed now. The great traveling camp made up of the combined armies of King Geza of Ungria and Lady Eudokia of Arethousa looked like a field of rubbish. A few brave souls staggered to and fro uttering aimless cries into the dawning light. Clouds covered the sky. The air, especially to the south and west, was yellow because of a dragging haze that obscured her view in every direction beyond an arrow’s shot. Only to the east was it vaguely lighter. A layer of ash covered everything, and it seemed most of the animals on which the army relied had fled. She had grit on her lips and in her eyes, and a skin of ash over every part of her body, even beneath her clothing, even under her eyelids.

“Hanna!”

She stumbled forward over a broken tent pole to grasp the arms of Sister Rosvita. “God be praised, Sister! Where are the others?”

“I have them all accounted for except Aurea, Teuda, and poor Sister Petra.”

“They are with me. What of Mother Obligatia?”

“She lives.” Rosvita shut her eyes as she exhaled, a sigh that seemed to shake the ground. Hanna found that she had tears in her eyes, knowing they had survived.

Thus far.

A bubble of canvas stretched and shifted like a living creature as Fortunatus emerged, wiping grime off his face. Beyond, not one tent remained standing. A body lay unmoving on the ground, but Hanna could not be sure the person was dead.