The Gathering Storm

  “Other crowns stand between Novomo and this distant place. Might these not confuse your passage?”

  “It is possible. If I can move swiftly enough, then I can correct for my mistakes and try again. I am confident that my calculations are correct. They have been double-checked by the Holy Mother herself. Her skills as a mathematicus are unequaled.”

  “Except perhaps by her daughter.”

  The felicity of his expression stilled and became rigid. He drew his finger south from the Ungrian border to the Heretic’s Sea and farther south yet into desert wilderness surrounding the holy city of Says, west to the ruins of Kartiako, then west and northwest to the disputed lands lying between southern Salia and the Jinna kingdom of Aquila, yet north and west again to the sheep’s head that marked Alba, and farther north yet to Eika country, inscribing a vast circle—a crown of sorts—across the continent of Novaria. By the time this was done he had recovered the mobility of his smile.

  He beckoned. The servingman shuffled forward and handed him a brass disk engraved with marks and adorned with a bar on one side and a curling nest of circles, a smaller one superimposed on a larger, on the other.

  “Except perhaps by her daughter,” he echoed. “Do you know what this is?”

  “I do not,” she admitted.

  He did not offer to let her hold it. “It is an astrolabe, which the Jinna use both as an observational instrument and a calculating device. It offers precision, and foreknowledge. I need only determine the altitude of a single star and with that information can tell which stars are about to rise and which have just set. You see there are several disks nestled here, each one a climate for a different latitude. If I am pulled off course, it will be quick work to forge a new path. I will get there.”

  “Geometry holds many mysteries for me still, Father Hugh. Now that you must journey east, what thought have you given to my role here in Darre?”

  After a measure of silence, during which the servingman shifted twice onto the creaking board before moving to avoid it, Hugh sat on the bench opposite Antonia and set his fine hands flat on the map, covering Wendar and Varre. “The Holy Mother Anne has departed Darre for the east with the emperor and the army.”

  “To the old imperial lands of Dalmiaka, so I have heard.”

  “What you have heard is true. For many years Anne supposed the central crown of the great crown lay at Verna, but now she realizes she is mistaken. This crown—” He pointed to a mark lying on the shore of the Middle Sea about halfway between Aosta and Arethousa. “—must come into our control. Therefore, a conquest. Empress Adelheid is pregnant again—”

  “Again!”

  “—so she remains in Darre. I have encouraged her to bring you into her schola. Go there now. Prepare the ground.”

  “Prepare the ground?”

  “We have spoken of this before. The cauda draconis has a particular role to play when a great spell is cast.”

  The cauda draconis died, but since he did not say so out loud, neither did she. She waited. Let him show his strengths and weaknesses first; then she would know how much to conceal and reveal.

  “Yet we need not stand passively.”

  “God’s will must be accomplished,” she agreed.

  “So it will be, Sister Antonia. But in order to accomplish God’s will the righteous ones must wield power.”

  She nodded. “You are ambitious.”

  He bowed his head. “I serve God, and the regnant. That is all.”

  He was lying, of course. Yet what difference did it make? In all the years of the church, no man had been skopos. Hugh had risen as high as he could. He needed her. For the time being, she needed him.

  “I will journey to Darre and join Empress Adelheid’s schola.”

  “She will welcome you, Sister. You will be satisfied with the arrangements. You will be shown the respect due to you.” He picked up the astrolabe and rose. “We must be patient, and cautious. Now we walk on the knife’s edge. Now is the most dangerous time. It would have been best if I had remained with the emperor, but the Holy Mother has given me a different part to play. Be wary. Be strong.”

  “You will not find me lacking, Father Hugh. I am aware that the hour of need draws close.”

  “‘All that is lost will be reborn on this Earth because of a Great Unveiling like to that Great Sundering in which vanished the Lost Ones.’ As it was said: ‘There will come a furious storm.’”

  “To overset the wicked.”

  He shrugged. “The innocent may drown in the same tide that sweeps away the wicked.”

  “Then they were not innocent, if God did not choose to protect them!”

  Because she was seated, he had the height to loom over her, and because he was beautiful, she felt, briefly, diminished, as though visited by the messenger of God, who stood in judgment upon her in all its glory and found her wanting.

  Antonia did not like to feel diminished.

  But his lips twisted up in an ironic smile, which betrayed his mortality and imperfection. “I have never been sure of God’s intentions,” he said softly. “Much has been hidden from our eyes, and more than that is twisted and confused. Where we have seen a horse, perhaps we have mistakenly called it a cow.”

  “Without conviction, there cannot be righteous behavior, Father Hugh. Be warned. Doubt is the tool of the Enemy.” She indicated the map. “I know the shape of the world, and its place in God’s plan. Do you?”

  “I know what I want,” he said, and with that he made his farewells and departed.

  4

  THE madman died soon after, leaving his corpse on the stone where he had slept. It was peace of a kind.

  There came a string of screaming prisoners dragged down into the depths to walk the wheel, but none of them lasted more than a score of turnings. He discovered by searching with his hands several who died in their sleep, worn to nothing, so emaciated it was a miracle they had been able to walk. Another lay in agony with the flux for hours or days until at last he voided his soul as well as his guts. The sleeping hollow stank so badly afterward that the next four prisoners refused to sleep there, preferring the noisy ledge beside the wheel. Even the miners complained that the smell made them sick, so eventually a pair of workers dumped chalk in the hollow and after a few turnings swept it up again, but for many turnings afterward he shed chalk dust like skin and traced it into the creases of his body and rubbed it out of his hair, although in truth any substance in his hair was a relief against the crawling lice and the endless scratching.

  One man slipped and broke his arm, and he died, too, for there was nothing to set it with and none of the guards cared to take the poor man back up, so the sweet sick smell of poison set in and the prisoner died suffering and babbling of nightmare visions. The next one leaped gibbering into the depths because he could not endure the darkness, and as the wheel rumbled on, strange noises echoed up from the pit where no miner walked—scraping and cracking, like dogs gnawing on bones.

  Maybe it was better to be dead than living in this purgatory, which wasn’t life or death but a state of abandonment in which neither the angels nor the demons could get their claws sunk into the flesh. He dreamed of sun and wind and the wide seas; he dreamed of the prows of dragon ships slicing through the swells as salt spray streamed against his face and wind snapped in his hair. But down here neither sun nor wind reached; he was buried, already entombed and awaiting only the final sentence.

  The miners dug a transverse gallery and found, unexpectedly, a vein of silver-lead ore so rich that the levels sounded at all hours with the uneven staccato of picks and hammers at work and the rattle of four-wheeled barrows and the squinch of the windlasses hauling up filled buckets and the murmur of miners coming and going. They spoke of new shafts to be sunk and fortunes to be made, and yet always they whispered of the creatures that lurked in the pit where the richest deposits lay ripe for the pickings except for the danger of unstable tunnels and the fear of what waited below. Every day a bucket of purest
silver was hauled up from the pit, and every day some dead creature or another pitched down into the darkness. Most of the dead men from the workings met their final resting place in this way although the overseer pretended that any prisoner who died while condemned to labor in the workings received a respectable burial and the blessing of a deacon.

  All criminals were doomed to the Pit, surely, so what difference does it make if we trade their corpses for silver?

  So they said, but their uneasiness wafted like the stink of the dead man’s voided bowels through the levels until the mines reeked with guilt.

  The wheels turned. He walked, because it was the only thing he remembered how to do. The dreams wicked away, swiftly come and swiftly gone, and if there had ever been any existence beyond the wheel, he had long since forgotten what it was. Whispers tickled him as smoke and steam did when a miner set fire to heat the rock and then poured water on it so it would crack. In these closed spaces he could smell and hear and taste every least tremor of life.

  “They say he’s protected by a twisted spell that looks like a bronze armband.”

  “I think he’s a demon.”

  “An angel.”

  “How else could he have survived so long? No man turns the wheels for as long as he has. Have you ever seen one last beyond two months?”

  “Has he been down there two months?”

  “Nay, three seasons or more.”

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “I was here when they brought him in the spring. Mute and blind, if you please.”

  “Hsst! It’s almost winter! The levels make no difference to him! If he’s touched in the head, he’s like to an ox pulling in its traces. That would explain it. A mute beast.”

  He walked, and he slept, and he ate, and walked and slept and ate, and again. And again.

  Until the guards clattered down one turning and surrounded him, thrust a hapless, moaning prisoner into his place on the wheel, and hauled him up the ladders, up and farther up although it was no trouble to climb because he trudged so far every day, until a strange touch hissed against his skin and he swayed, dizzily, as air opened around him and they emerged from the workings.

  So many smells! The perfume of earth made him reel. The scent of fallen leaves and the stink of forges dug into his lungs until he coughed. Sounds expanded, fading away into the heavens, which were unbound by stone walls.

  There were too many noises to sort through: the hammer of picks breaking up rock; a man’s shout; a goat’s bleat; the susurrus of wind; feet grinding on loose rock and squeaking on damped down earth as a man halted before him.

  Sour breath chased across his nostrils. The breeze carried the rich tang of horse manure.

  “Here’s the one, Foucher.”

  “Ai, Lord! What a stink! Best clean him up.”

  “Do you think so? If we clean him up, no one will believe he’s survived below for so long. The duke won’t be impressed.”

  “Umm. True enough. But the highborn won’t like the stench.”

  “Nor will any man, low or high. I can scarce endure it.”

  “True words. This creature is something rarely seen. We’ve got us a real prize here. He looks strong enough still.” The point of a stick prodded him in the chest, but no hands touched his body. “He might last months more on the wheel.”

  “Years more!”

  “Do you think so, Captain? Think you so? That would be a miracle!” Foucher snickered, enjoying this thought as another man might enjoy the sport of laughing, innocent children.

  “You feed on our misery,” he said to Foucher.

  Silence from his captors, fed by drawn-in breaths. “I thought he couldn’t talk!” exclaimed the Captain.

  A switch whistled, snapped against his ear.

  Pain exploded in his head, that had for so long now been a half-forgotten dull ache.

  “So he shan’t!” said Foucher. “We’ll take him over quickly. Parade him before the duke and whip him if he speaks, then haul him back down below.” Foucher hissed hard between his teeth and the stick prodded him again, this time in the stomach, but its thrust barely penetrated the pain raging in his skull. “You’ll keep quiet, Silent, if you know what’s good for you!”

  “Maybe this isn’t wise—” protested the Captain.

  “Nay, I already told the duke we’d a fine strange sight for him, so he’s waiting. I hate to disappoint him.”

  “Ai, indeed. He might do anything if we displease him. He’s that angry already that there isn’t more ore, nor did he like the sleeping conditions for the prisoners.”

  “As if they deserve better!” The switch slapped against his buttocks. “Get on! Get on!”

  He stumbled forward. As the pain throbbed with each jarring step, vision flashed on and out as a man might catch glimpses in a dark room when a candle was covered and uncovered.

  He saw feet so grimy and mottled with a scaly growth that they didn’t seem human feet at all; then nothing, blinding darkness; then a swaying distant ocean of yellow and orange; then darkness; then the ocean again, but these were trees seen a long way away only it had been so long since he had seen trees painted with the colors of autumn that it had taken him this long to recognize them; then night as the clamor of the workings muted as they walked out beyond it; then mushrooms growing in sparse grass, only these weren’t mushrooms but pale tents and graceful awnings sagging and rising in the wind with brightly colored creatures laughing and chattering and walking out under the sun. A magnificent, broad-shouldered lord stood among them whose skin was dirty yet after all not dirty but burned a deep brown complexion like that of Liath. Beside him clung a frail, pallid woman with hair the color of wheat. Her belly was swollen with pregnancy. She and her noble husband turned to see the curiosity that the foreman of the mines had brought for their amusement.

  He saw her face. She was repulsed by the grime but otherwise disinterested. Yet he recognized her.

  “Tallia,” he said, the word like the throttling gasp of a man as a noose tightens around his neck. A nail burned in his empty hand.

  His voice woke memory in her. Her expression shifted and altered.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said. “Tallia is pregnant.”

  But it was a lie.

  Her shriek cut through the pain. Darkness swallowed the brief stab of vision. He drowned.

  “Conrad! Take him away! Make them take him away!”

  “I pray you, Your Highness, we meant no offense,” gabbled Foucher. “An amusement only, meant for your—”

  “Lord have mercy!” swore the duke as the woman shrieked on and on and on, a grating wail that dissolved into hiccoughs and a whining sob. “Take the creature away, Foucher. I know you meant no harm. It’s a miracle, indeed, and he looks more like a goblin than a man with so much filth caked on him, although I wonder if you wouldn’t get higher yields if your criminals lived under better conditions.”

  “But my lord duke—”

  “If I starved my soldiers and let them sleep out in the rain, they’d be too weak to fight. Why do you mistreat these poor souls?”

  “The miners are hardworking free men, my lord duke. As for these others, they are only criminals. Half of them had a death sentence imposed on them for their sins but were shown mercy by being sent here instead.”

  “A strange sort of mercy. It wasn’t so bad last year, as I recall it. I never saw so many sickly creatures in my life. Look at the sores on that man!”

  “He’s no more than a mute beast, my lord duke. It’s a miracle that he turns the wheel as well as he does. Think of it as his penance for the crime he committed.”

  “Maybe so. No matter. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I have need of different miracles today such as more iron for my army and silver for minting coin. To add grief to all else we have word that the Eika have come back and are harrying the Salian coast! Take him away. Away! As for you, Foucher, my clerics will look over your records of the summer’s yields.”

 
“Throw him into the pit! He should be dead! He’s dead!”

  “For God’s sake, Tallia! Control yourself!”

  A choked silence followed the crack of his words, and after it a sniveling whine that blended with the whisper of the breeze through distant leaves and the faraway noise of the workings and the sting of smoke from the charcoal fires set through the forest for leagues around.

  “Should we throw him in the pit, my lord duke?” asked Foucher, voice trembling. “He’s a valuable, worker. We’ve none so strong for the wheels as this one.”

  “God Above! I hate wasting good labor. Nay, put him back to his task, as he was before. He’s serving his sentence, just as we all are. Nay! Enough, Tallia! We’ll speak no more on it!”

  The switch stung his thigh. “Get on! Get on!” said the Captain. “This is all your fault!”

  He stumbled, blind again, and tripped, and fell, but a hand grasped his arm, pinching his skin, and dragged him upright and hauled him away as he wept because she had betrayed him and he had betrayed Lavastine only he could not remember how. The past was closed to him. The blindness swallowed him up.

  They came back to the workings, yet at the lip of the shaft a man’s silky voice drew the Captain aside, saying, “Here’s two gold nomias for you, friend, if you’ll cast that creature into the pit I hear tell you have beneath the levels, out of which no man ever emerges. You’ll gain as well the favor of Her Highness Lady Tallia who, I should tell you just between you and me, will be Queen of Varre soon enough. Duke Conrad’s war along the border against the Salians is going well. There’s no word from Henry in Aosta. Varre will break free of the Wendish yoke soon. There’s no one to stop Duke Conrad for he’s born out of the same royal lineage as Henry, just as his lady wife is, and she with the right of primogeniture on her mother’s side as well. Do what Lady Tallia wishes and you’ll be glad of her favor in the days to come. Trust me.”