In the Ruins (21 page)

Soldiers rolled up blankets. Sentries called out a challenge to men trudging into camp with full buckets drawn from a nearby stream, while grooms led the horses to water in groups of twenty. As ragged and weary as his men looked, he knew the horses managed worst of all. The army was almost out of grain, a meager ration to begin with, and the grazing was poor. At least, here on the northern slopes of the mountains, the water was clear, unclouded by particles and ash. Yet it still hadn’t rained, despite the clouds, and both villages they had passed as they came down out of the mountains had been deserted, houses and huts blown down by the great storm.

“I can’t stop seeing them,” she whispered. “The way they burned. I can’t stop hearing them scream.”

He knew better than to touch her when she was in this
mood. “They were your enemies.” He’d said the same thing a hundred times in the last fifteen days. “They would have killed you.”

“I know. But I still feel unclean, as though I’m stained with the Enemy’s handiwork.”

He waited. As the light rose, the world came into view: hills, forest, wilting trees. Drought and lack of sun, unseasonable heat followed by this sudden cold winter blast, had taken their toll on the vegetation. To the north the land was too hilly to see far. The road twisted away past a ridgeline, lost to sight. To the south, on a clear day, they would have been able to see the mountain peaks, but there was yet a haze dusting the air, ever present. Even at midday the light lacked strength. It was uncanny. Indeed, it scared him more than anything else. He was no farmer, but he knew what farmers needed: rain, sun, and seasonable weather. After years of civil strife, invasion, drought, famine, and plague, he could not imagine that any Wendish noble or biscop held plentiful stores in reserve. They had already suffered hard times. How long would these clouds linger?

“Death in battle is not the worst we may see,” he said at last. “Those deaths may be the most merciful ones, in the end.”

She had shed a few tears, but she wiped them away. She examined him as she might study a manuscript, that look that devoured, so rarely turned on him! He did not understand her yet. He wasn’t even sure what she thought of him. That she was willing to
love
him passionately he knew. Of the rest, of what lay beyond lust, he had to unfold piece by piece.

“I’ll keep trying,” she said, and it took him a moment to realize she meant that she would keep trying to find her Eagle’s Sight. “The crowns, too. If they’re all fallen, then we have no advantage over our enemies. But no disadvantage either as they have nothing we do not also possess. Unless there are those still who can see with Eagle’s Sight while denying it to us.”

“Do you think there might be?”

She looked at Hathui. Hathui shrugged, without expression.
The two women trusted each other in a way that, annoyingly, excluded him.

“I don’t think it likely any other person born of humankind has survived who can see if I cannot.” Liath said the words without vanity or arrogance. “Eagle’s Sight ran through the world on the river of aether. That element is bound into my being, so I should be more sensitive to its ebb and flow than most of my father’s kinfolk. Yet it also seems likely to me that a sorcerer whose skills are honed to the finest pitch might be able to discern things I cannot. And I know nothing of those ancient ones who spoke to me, or the Ashioi, or the Horse people. They may still possess the sight, while we’ve gone blind. And anyway, I am so young, so ignorant, compared to someone like Li’at’dano—”

“See who comes,” interrupted Hathui, lifting her chin.

The centaurs had proved hardiest of all his soldiers. Like goats, they seemed able to eat almost anything, although he had never seen any of the Horse people eat meat. Capi’ra’s fine coat was discolored by streaks of grime, but she looked perfectly able to trample him on the spot if he gave offense.

He nodded, acknowledging her. She stamped once.

“It is time.” She gestured toward the east. “We turn east and follow the hills on our own path. We come to northern plains of Ungria and from there east to home. Our alliance is finished. Now we leave.”

“I am sorry to see you and your people go,” he said, “but I know I cannot hold you here.”

“That is right.”

He smiled. She did not smile in reply, but neither did she frown. “What of the future?” he asked. “What of our alliance?”

“I report on all we witness to the council, as you would say. The ones who lead us will discuss all that happened. The strong minds will decide. We, the rest, will follow.”

“What of our daughter?” asked Liath.

“I have not forgotten your daughter, Bright One. See who comes with me.” She flicked a hand up.

There were some of the steppe-dwelling Kerayit among
her dozen attendants, but to Sanglant’s surprise the shaman, Gyasi, had also come, together with a pair of Quman captains. He hadn’t noticed them at first because, not mounted, they weren’t yet wearing their wings, and judged by facial features alone they did not look so very different from the Kerayit tribesmen.

The shaman and his companions knelt before Sanglant, tapped knuckles to foreheads as they acknowledged Liath’s presence.

“We beg you, master,” said Gyasi, “let us return with the Horse people to our homeland. I will be your messenger. I will seek news of your daughter. I will bring her back to you if she still lives. My clan owes her our service, for as long as she lives.”

Liath looked away, wiping a tear off her cheek. “She lives,” she muttered. “I saw her.” She swung back to face Sanglant. “I should go.”

“No. I grieve for Blessing as well. I fear for her. But it serves no purpose for you to travel east on a journey that could take years. I weep for my daughter. I miss her. But if you go, it will not bring her back more quickly. And if she is dead—”

“She is not dead!”

“She is not dead if our wills make it true, but we don’t know. I trust Gyasi to find her and bring her home. Heribert is with her. That must be enough. There is too much at stake elsewhere, and I. Need. You.”

She lifted a hand. She could not answer in any other way. It was not acquiescence, precisely. She was herself torn and indecisive.

“Take what supplies you need, Gyasi. You take as well my heart, for my daughter is precious to me.”

Gyasi nodded. “She saved my life and that of my nephews, Majesty. This obligation I owe to her. I am not a man unless it is discharged.”

Even so, even knowing he did what was necessary, he found that he, like Liath, could not speak because of sorrow and fear choking the words in his throat. He, too, lifted a hand. The gesture must speak where he would otherwise break down. So much loss; Blessing might be the least of it.

The shaman rose, but paused before he turned away. The centaurs and their attendants were already moving toward the pathless forest while Gyasi hummed a queer little tuneless melody under his breath. A twisting track opened between the trees, not quite seen, not quite felt, but present as mist rising from the hills at dawn. The fall of hooves, the rattle of harness, the soft conversations among men all vanished, bit by bit, as the party moved onto that path and vanished into the woodland. Behind Sanglant, the army made ready to leave, but men stopped in their tasks, hearing that uncanny music, and stared as the forest swallowed the centaurs and their companions. Last of all, Gyasi stepped onto the path, and the trees closed in behind him. At once, the forest appeared as an impenetrable tangle of fallen logs and stands of beech and fir grown among brambles and thickets of sedge and bilberry.

“Their path will be swift, I’d wager,” murmured Hathui.

“Let us leave this behind,” said Liath, more quaver than voice. “I will cry.”

Every man and woman was eager to get moving, to reach home. To discover if home had weathered the storm. Many, like Liutgard and Burchard and what remained of their armies, had been away from Wendar for years, having marched south with Henry in his quest to restore Taillefer’s fallen empire. That was all gone now.

So much else was gone, he thought, brooding as they rode at a steady pace along the road. Often they had to halt while those in the vanguard cleared the road. The storm had torn through this countryside, leaving debris everywhere. No one would lack firewood for burning this winter, had they any game to roast over the flames.

“You are quiet, Your Majesty,” said Hathui having given up her attempts to get Liath to speak.

“What have we left?” he asked her. “What was once an alliance is now, again, only loyal Wendishmen and march-landers.”

“Isn’t that for the best?”

“Is it? Did we not have strength in numbers? Did we not have strength because we reached across the old boundaries?
My father was not foolish in thinking that empire would make him strong.”

“It killed him.”

Hathui’s tone surprised him, but as he examined her face, he saw neither anger or resentment, only sadness.

“Did it? That he marched south to Aosta—perhaps. Yet any of us might die, on any day.”

“Perhaps not you, Your Majesty.”

The barb had a sharp hook. “That may be, yet I pray you consider that my father might have died in his bed, or fighting against his enemies in Wendar, as easily as he was captured by the queen’s plots.”

“Do not forget Hugh of Austra, Your Majesty.”

Ah.

He glanced at Liath, but she seemed far removed from their conversation. She had light hands on her mount, a submissive mare who was content to follow where the rest led. She was far beyond him, a world away, judging by her frown and the unfocused nature of her gaze, not quite lighting on tree or earth or cloudy sky.

“I have not forgotten him, Hathui. Where he is now, I cannot say.”

“Dead, I hope,” muttered Hathui. “I saw him murder Villam with his own hands. I will never forgive him that, although my forgiveness is not a thing a man of his station cares about. If he lives, he will have found refuge. I hope he is dead.”

“I would just like to know.” He laughed. “Better to know that there’s a man in the dark stalking you with a knife. Even if you can’t see him. Yet what do you make of it, Hathui?”

“Of Hugh’s plots and Queen Adelheid’s treachery?”

“Nay. Of this new alliance.”

“What alliance, Your Majesty?” She looked around, as if expecting a pack of wolves to lope out of the surrounding woods. As they moved down into the bowl of a valley, beech and silver fir gave way to spruce. The dense boughs of spruce had absorbed the heavy winds better than most trees. Although the road was darker, often shaded and
dim, few broken branches and fallen trees blocked their path.

“That between the Quman and the Horse people.”

“Is there one?” Liath had been listening, after all. She spoke as if the question had been addressed to her. “The Horse people are few, so they say. If they do not make allies of the Quman, they will end up fighting them. So they have done for generations, surely, with the aid of sorcery.”

“So they have done, but it is not clear what will become of sorcery now, or how the balance of power will change with the return of my mother’s people. If I were one of the leaders of the Horse people, I would seek allies. It may be they will seek an alliance with the Quman. It may even be they will seek an alliance with the Ashioi.”

“The Horse people and the Ashioi were enemies.”

“Long ago.”

“I have met Zuangua, as have you, Sanglant. To him, to the many who lived in the shadows all that time, it is not long ago but yesterday. Even to the ones who were born in exile, it is within the living memory of your grandfather, who can tell the tale.”

Sanglant had only the vaguest memory of his father’s father, Arnulf the Younger, but Henry’s mother, Queen Mathilda, had patted and cosseted her young grandson as affectionately as could so reserved a woman. All her love was held tight for Henry. She had admired Sanglant, but his birth had meant most to her, he suspected, because it gave Henry his claim to the regnancy.

So it was strange to think of having a grandfather, so old a man that he had seen the world almost three millennia ago. He could not grasp such an expanse of time. He had never been one to hoard grudges or dwell on the past. He refused to live in Bloodheart’s hall forever, chained down with the dogs.

“That may be true,” he replied, “but enemies can become allies if a greater threat rises.”

“Who would that be?” demanded Hathui. “If the stories are true, humankind and the Horse people moved heaven and earth in truth to cast away the Ashioi. If I were one of the Lost Ones, I’m not sure I could forgive that. If I were
one of the Horse people, I’m not sure I would expect to be forgiven.”

He laughed. “We are not the Horse people. They are not like us. Li’at’dano said so herself. She said that humankind have driven them far into the east, and decimated their herds through disease and conflict.”

“The Quman did that,” said Hathui, “who hate and fear them.”

“And others. But Capi’ra and her troop have seen the west, now. Wendish folk defeated the Quman. Anne and her sorcerers raised this great storm. If I were one who leads among the Horse people, then I would fear Wendar.”

“There is another power that you neglect,” said Liath suddenly. “Anne did not raise the storm. The ancient ones did. Li’at’dano did. The Ashioi land would have returned in any case. Anne meant to exile them again, to destroy them for all time. That she did not, that worse destruction did not overtake us all, is due to the voices from the north. There is power there we must not ignore.”

“The Eika?” Hathui asked. “They are barbarians. One chieftain might strike and lay waste along the coast, but I recall how Count Lavastine held them off with his local milites. A strong Wendish and Varren resistance will beat them back.”

“Perhaps,” said Sanglant. “It bears watching.”

“There is so much we do not know,” murmured Liath, “and it will be more difficult to learn now that we are blind.”

WHEN they stopped at nightfall, Hanna left her guards while they argued over whether or not to set up a tent for the night, and staggered over to a trickling stream. In the midst of a crowd of hot, thirsty, complaining Arethousan soldiers she splashed water on her face and slurped down
as much as she could hold in her cupped hands. Soon the water became murky from so many stamping through the shallows. A man slammed into her shoulder as he pushed forward toward the stream. He muttered a curse, looked at her once, then a second time, and called to his fellows.