In the Ruins (23 page)

A pair of servants trudged in bearing buckets of water. They set them down and busied themselves with the pitcher and basin. Her eyes were still stinging. As much as she swallowed, she could not get all her fear and frustration and anger down.

Is this all her life came to? Had she somehow angered God so much that she was to be passed from one hand to the next as a prisoner? The general might call her an Eagle, but she was no such thing. It would have been better to have stayed in Heart’s Rest and married Young Johan even with his smelly feet and braying, stupid laugh. A cow or goat was not precisely free, but at least it wasn’t caged within narrow walls. She knew better than to let self-pity overwhelm her, but the temptation just for this moment was to fall and fall.

One servant poured water from pitcher into basin. Because the scent of water hit her hard, she looked at them. They were both middle-aged men, wiry and strong, with stern expressions. They were the kind of men who have risen far enough to receive a measure of comfort and security as retainers of a powerful lord. One was, indeed, handsome enough that she might have looked twice at him if he hadn’t been old enough to be her father. Bysantius’ unwanted but flattering proposal had woken old feelings in her. It wasn’t so bad to be desired or at least respected. Ivar was lost to her. She had admired Captain Thiadbold, but held loyal to her Eagle’s vows. Rufus had,
momentarily, tempted her, but in the end she had chosen the easier path. She had held herself aloof. She had never succumbed.

Not as Liath had.

In a way, she was envious of Liath, who had embraced passion without looking back, despite the trouble it had brought her.

I am not so impulsive
.

Yet it wasn’t so. She had left Heart’s Rest to follow Liath. She had walked without fear into the east. She had wandered in dreams into the distant grasslands seeking the Kerayit shaman who had named Hanna as her luck.

The good-looking servant winked at her, then rubbed at his dirty forehead with the stump of his right arm, cut off at the wrist and cleanly healed. The position of his arm concealed his mouth from his companion. His lips formed a word once, then a second time, soundless but obviously meant to be understood.

Patience
.

She startled back. Had she imagined it? Was he speaking in Wendish?

He and the other servant, carrying the emptied buckets, walked out the door, keeping silence as a new captain droned on with his report. She heard, in the wake of their passing, a faint tinkling like that of tiny bells shaken by a breeze.

Five breaths later she knew, and was surprised it had taken her so long. He hadn’t been wearing a churchman’s robes but rather the simple garb of an Arethousan peasant. He had looked different, somehow; harder and keener and even, strange to say, more like a man who might want to be kissed, not a celibate churchman.

Yet he had loved once, and passionately. Like Liath, he had leaped and never regretted.

The rank perfume of the camphor faded, but air within the enclosed tent seemed to rush in a whirlpool around her as though stirred by daimone’s wings. Why was Brother Breschius working as a servant in the camp of his enemy’s army?

The wasp sting burned in her heart.

SANGLANT’S army bedded down in and around yet another deserted village. The signs of abandonment did not tell a clear tale: had all the inhabitants died? Had they only fled, hearing the approach of an unknown army? Or had they fled days ago in the wake of the storm? Had some other force driven them away or taken them prisoner?

In these distant marchland borderlands, empty wilderness stretched wide, and villages were without exception bounded by log palisades, which protected mostly against wild beasts both animal and human since a true army would make short work of such meager fortifications. This one had not burned, but the gates sat wide and the vanguard had marched in without seeing any living creature except for a pair of crows that fluttered away into the trees, cawing.

“I miss birdsong,” Liath said. “Even in winter, there should be some about.”

Sanglant was out on his evening round of the army. Hathui had gone with him, leaving her with a trio of Eagles who regarded her with wary interest. She did not feel easy with Sanglant’s noble brethren and preferred the company of the messengers.

“Hanna spoke of you,” said the redheaded one called Rufus.

“Hanna! When did you last speak with Hanna?”

“Months ago. More than that, perhaps. A year, or more. She came south with a message from Princess Theophanu. Hathui says that she and Hanna met on the road, in Avaria or Wayland—I’m not sure which—and that Hanna knew the truth of what had happened to the king but she never confided in me or anyone.”

“Why not?”

“She was watchful. That’s all I know. I liked her.”

Liath propped her chin on a cupped fist and frowned at the Eagle. He was a likable, even-tempered young man who reminded her vaguely of Ivar but perhaps only because
of his red hair. They looked nothing alike, and he did not have Ivar’s inconvenient and ill-timed passions.

She sighed. Heart’s Rest seemed impossibly distant. That interlude with Hanna and Ivar, innocent friends, could never have happened in a world as blighted as this one. How blind she had been in those days! Hanna’s friendship was true enough, but Hanna had been struggling with her own obstacles, which Liath had blithely ignored. Ivar had never been her friend; she had pretended otherwise because his infatuation with her had made her uncomfortable.

Because he had seemed so callow, compared to Hugh. As much as she had hated Hugh, she had never truly stopped comparing Ivar to him, and found Ivar always wanting although he was honest and true.

“Hanna is my friend,” she said at last, seeing that the others—Rufus, dark-haired Nan, and an older man all the other Eagles called Hasty because of his deliberate way of doing things but whose name was Radamir—watched her. “I wish we had news of her.”

“I don’t know if she survived the earthquake,” said Rufus. “That one that collapsed St. Mark’s. I heard a rumor that she and some of the king’s schola crept away during the tumult. I was gone by then. She had been placed in Presbyter Hugh’s retinue, but Duchess Liutgard was unhappy about it. He never allowed Hanna to make her full report to the king—that is, the emperor.”

She questioned him further, but he hadn’t much more to relate although it all emerged in greatest detail, since Eagles honed their ability to memorize and recollect.

“I pray she still lives,” Rufus finished. “She is a good woman.”

“If any can survive this, Hanna can.”

Behind, a commotion signaled the approach of Sanglant and his entourage: the tread of footsteps, the babble of conversation, a chuckle, a muttered wager. It never let up. Tonight he spoke with his cousin, Liutgard, whom he seemed to trust, while that bastard Wichman trailed behind making crude jokes to the Ungrian captain, Istvan, who bore his witticisms stolidly. A bevy of nobles swarmed
around; a steward waited at his right hand; soldiers loitered beyond the firelight, never straying far.

He stood straight and held the centermost place among his retinue, with that astonishing ability to know where each of his attendants were without skipping from place to place like an anxious dog seeking a pat on the head. But she could see in his face and bearing that the journey and the obligations thrust upon him were exhausting him. He was strong, but even the strongest must rest.

Soldiers had already pitched the journeying tent in which they slept. Thank the Lord and Lady that it was too small to admit more than two people.

She caught Captain Fulk’s attention, and he nodded at her and chivvied the king toward his pallet, separating him smoothly away from the others. Liath wasn’t sure if Fulk liked her, or even respected her, but on this account, at least, they understood one another.

She took her leave of the Eagles and, as Sanglant’s attendants made ready to sleep, dispersed to their own encampments, or settled in for guard duty, she crawled into the tent and pulled off her boots.

“You must come with me when I tour the army,” he said impatiently. “You must be seen at my side, as my consort. As co-regnant.”

“I pray you, give me time. I am not yet accustomed to it.”

She doubted she would ever become accustomed to it. She needed peace, and silence, and the company of books, but she dared not tell him that, not now. Not yet.

He seemed about to say something, but did not, and stripped off the rest of his clothing instead. In general, unless attack was imminent, he preferred to sleep naked, and he was warm enough to protect her against the cold, which always debilitated her.

“I will never get used to cold,” she said as she pulled off her shift and, shivering, pressed herself against him skin to skin while pulling furs and cloaks over them.

“Yet you burn!” he whispered, kissing her.

“Umm,” she said.

But after a moment he lay back, and she rested her head on his shoulder and waited. She was getting to know him.
At moments like this, he had something in his mind troubling him that he would at length spit out.

“Are you still angry with me?” he asked. “For forbidding you from going after Blessing?”

Guilt, like a hungry dog, will stare and stare. She had lived with its presence all day until it had become a dead weight in her stomach. His breathing was steady. Hers was not.

“Oh, love, had I insisted on going, I would have gone, and you could not have stopped me.”

He caught in his breath as if slapped, but said nothing; then let it out again, and still said nothing.

She went on, because his silence hurt too much. “I abandoned her. In Verna, first, even though it wasn’t my choice to leave. For the second time out on the steppes, when we left her behind knowing she was close to death. And now, this time, for the third. So many voices chase through my head. What use is such a long journey when there are others who can make it for me? Who are better able to endure the trek. Who can serve in this way, as I can serve in others.”

He still made no answer except to stroke her arm, shoulder to elbow, shoulder to elbow, his way of pacing when he was lying down.

“I do not even know Blessing. I may never know her. That is the choice I face. That is the choice I made.”

“I could have gone,” he said angrily, hoarsely, but his voice always sounded like that. “Yet she is one child. Wendar and Varre and all who live there—all who survived the cataclysm—may fall into chaos. Without the order imposed by the regnancy, there will be war between nobles, between duchies and counties. That is the choice I made. It is the obligation I accepted, although I never sought it. How is your choice different?”

“I am not Henry’s heir. I am not even Taillefer’s great grandchild. I am the daughter of a minor noble house, nothing more.”

“That strangely makes me think of Hugh of Austra, who would not have cared one whit for the daughter of a minor noble house, if that is all you were.”

“Ah! That was a cruel blow.”

“So it was intended to be. I grieve for Blessing. No one does more than I do. I admit I didn’t always like my sweet girl, but I always loved her.
Love
her. If she is dead, Liath, if she already died, then we made the right choice.”

“I saw her.”

“You are blind in your Eagle’s Sight. What was this vision, then? True, or false?”

“I believe it was true. I saw Blessing. I saw Li’at’dano. I think I saw Wolfhere. I saw a vision of you, when you took in the Wendish refugees who had fled Darre. Henry’s schola, most of them.”

“That’s right,” he admitted. “It might well have been a true vision.”

“Or it might have been a dream. I might only have wanted to see her so badly…. It seemed so real. I saw her arguing with a youth, a young man—”

“Thiemo? Matto?”

“I never saw him before.”

“Might it have been the past you saw?”

“Nay—she was the age she was when we left her.” But not yet as old as in that terrible vision when she had seen Blessing held prisoner by Hugh. “It was the present, or the future. I’m sure of it. It means she lives.”

“If that is so, and if Gyasi brings her back to us safe and alive, then we made the right choice.”

“What if she dies because one of us did not go to her?”

“Then we will be responsible. How else can we judge? What else can we do? Each day I must choose, and some may die, and some live, because of decisions I make.”

“Ah, God. It is no good task. So many are already dead.”

“And yet more would be dead, if you had not confronted Anne and killed her. You know it is true.”

“It is true,” she said reluctantly, “but I feel no triumph in victory.”

“That is because we gained no victory. All we managed was no defeat.”

“I met a party of farmers in Aosta. After the griffins rescued me from Zuangua. These farmers had lost their homes to the windstorm. Passing troops had stolen what
remained of their stores. No doubt it seemed fitting to that lord and his army to do so, for he must supply his own in order to fight.”

“So he must, but he will not eat the next year if all those who farm for him die of starvation.”

One of the knots plaguing her stomach relaxed. “I suppose that is only one tiny injustice among so many great ones. Yet it makes me think of words Hathui once said: ‘The Lord and Lady love us all equally in Their hearts.”’

“That being so,” he murmured in reply, “why did God make Wichman the son of a duchess and Fulk, who is in every way his superior as a man, the son of a minor steward without rank or standing except that which I give him? Why did I live when all my faithful Dragons died?”

“The church mothers have an answer to all these questions, else we would fall endlessly into the Pit for wondering.”

“What is their answer?”

“I can quote chapter and verse, but in the end, their answers are all the same: Humankind cannot know the mind of God.”

“As dogs cannot know the mind of their master, although they strive to be obedient?”

She laughed.

“I must acquire a pack of loyal hounds, who will sit at my feet and growl at the faithless and remind me of how untrustworthy courtiers can be. Poor things.”