The Gathering Storm
“Will they follow our trail?” Gerwita whispered.
“It may be, but we must pray they detect nothing until morning.”
“I hope so.”
“Careful,” said Diocletia, ahead of her. “There’s a cut in the ground five steps ahead. When I touch you, stop, and I’ll help you over.”
Rosvita relayed the message back to the others. In four more steps she found herself passed from one strong hand to the next as Diocletia and Hilaria helped her over a ditch cut into the ground by a dry streambed. She and Gerwita waited on the other side while the pallet was laboriously handed across, and the rest followed, using the staffs for balance. After a brief rest, they moved on.
In this way, although she was so weary that she was shaking all over, they walked and walked and walked, pausing to rest only when they reached an obstacle of rock or earth or, once, a dense tangle of thorny burnet they had to detour around. Gaps appeared in the cloud cover, revealing, stars and, intermittently, the waxing gibbous moon. No one spoke except to pass warnings down the line; once, Petra bleated like a goat, and they heard a distant answering bleat from the night. Gerwita giggled nervously. Ruoda coughed.
Eventually, the ground began to slope noticeably upward and the noise of the sea receded as they climbed, pressing inland until they came to a forest of pine with a light layer of shrub whose spines and thorns caught in their clothing. When Jerome dropped the chest a second time after stumbling over a root, Rosvita insisted they stop and rest.
Every soul there dropped to the ground like a stone except Hilaria and Diocletia, who consulted with each other and then split up, Hilaria to scout forward and Diocletia to range back along their trail to make sure they weren’t yet being followed. Gerwita fussed over Rosvita.
“I pray you, child, I am too weary to move, but perhaps you could see if Brother Jerome is injured in any way.”
“Of course, Sister!”
Hanna groaned and moved over to sit beside Rosvita, blowing on her hands. “I’ll have blisters!”
“How do you fare, Eagle?”
“Well enough. Mother Obligatia weighs so little. It’s a miracle she still lives.”
“A miracle, perhaps, or stubbornness. Never underestimate the power of obstinance.”
Hanna chuckled, then sobered. “Is it true she is Liath’s grandmother?”
“Twice over.”
“Ai, God! I pray we find Liath again, and that Mother Obligatia survives long enough for them to meet.”
“I believe that it is that hope which keeps the good mother alive.”
They breathed in silence for a while, listening to the murmur of wind through the pines and underbrush, to the hacking coughs of the companions, to Petra’s mumbling conversation held with herself. The scent of myrtle and wild sage gave the night a bracing flavor. Their party sat so close together that it was easy to mark all of them as much by feel as by sight, although by now the wind had blown the clouds into scraps that left the sky in tatters with the moon’s face revealed.
“I can no longer hear the sea,” said Rosvita, “yet that was all I heard in my dreams.”
“There was light enough to see when we first walked out of the crown. The stone circle stands at the edge of a great cliff. I got dizzy looking down to the water. It was so far below. And all up and down the coast I saw neither dunes nor beaches, but only a line of sheer cliff. It seemed strange to me, so sharp. I’ve seen the shore of the northern sea, and it’s so very different, very flat. The waves creep in a long ways before they draw out again.”
“I’ve never seen the sea.”
“Not in all your travels with the king?”
Rosvita smiled. “Are you surprised, Eagle? I expect you are better traveled than I am.”
“Although you ride with the king’s progress? I wouldn’t have thought so. You’re from the North Mark, just as I am. The sea is not more than a day’s walk from my village and your father’s manor.”
“I was sent south as a child to enter the schola before I ever rode to the sea. Nay, I have never seen it, although I would like to.”
Hanna lifted her hands and blew on them to ease the raw skin. Rosvita shifted her weight from one buttock to the other; the litter of pine needles was a prickly cushion. Gerwita whispered to Jerome; Aurea brought round a skin of cider, almost turned to vinegar, which she offered first to Rosvita and then to Hanna, and it was only after she had gone on to Fortunatus where he sat beside Mother Obligatia that the Eagle replied.
“I have dreams, but they seem like true dreams, like visions of things that are happening, not dreams at all. I was told in a dream that I am the luck of a Kerayit shaman. Do you know what that means?”
“The Kerayit? Are they not a barbarian tribe far to the east? I believe that Prince Bayan’s mother came of that savage race. Beyond that …” She shook her head. “… I know little enough, but I am always eager to learn more. What does it mean to be the luck of a Kerayit shaman?”
A nightjar churred, and Hanna started, half rising to her feet. “It is the wrong time of year for a nightjar to call out to its mate!”
“Unless winter is past and this is the last snow of spring.”
“Hush!” hissed Aurea. “Someone is coming!”
Brush rattled as Diocletia strode out of the underbrush into the clearing where they had thrown themselves down.
“Up!” she said, pitching her voice low. “They are already on our trail. I saw a dozen or more torches back on our path. They were rising and dipping as the men holding them bent to examine the ground. We must move on.”
Fear lent them strength. Hanna pressed her palms to her cheeks before going back to the pallet. Gerwita hurried back to aid Rosvita in standing.
“I won’t leave you!” she said predictably, but Rosvita only smiled and tried not to groan as she started forward. She ached everywhere. She was already exhausted.
“This way,” said Diocletia, heading into the brush.
“What about Sister Hilaria?” protested Heriburg.
“Come along,” said Diocletia, not waiting for them.
They had not gone more than a hundred paces when they stumbled out from under the cover of the wood into an olive grove where, under the light of the moon, Hilaria stood facing a brace of men armed with hoes and a trio of silent dogs standing at alert.
“I can take them,” muttered Hanria.
Hearing them, Hilaria raised a hand although she did not turn. “I pray you, Sister Rosvita, come forward. These speak no language I know. Perhaps they are Arethousan.”
They were not, nor did they appear to recognize that tongue when Rosvita begged for aid. They had the look of farmers, stocky and powerful, and when they beckoned, Rosvita felt it prudent for their party to follow. Perhaps Hanna could dispatch them, but Mother Obligatia could not flee if anything went wrong.
Yet as they walked behind the farmers through the grove and then between the rows of a small vineyard, twisting and turning on a well-worn path, Rosvita did not feel that their captors were precisely suspicious but only wary. They neither threatened nor barked, not even the dogs. The path brought them to a village, no more than ten houses built with brick or sod in a style unknown to her together with a building whose proportions she recognized instantly: this squat, rectangular structure looked more like a barracks than a church, but by the round tower at one end and adjoining graveyard, she knew it was an Arethousan church.
A bearded man wearing the robe of a priest with a stole draped over his left shoulder waited on the portico of the church attended by a score of soldiers. Torches revealed their grim faces. The priest wore a Circle of Unity at his chest with a bar bisecting it, the sigil of the Arethousan church.
“I pray you, Holy Father,” said Rosvita in Arethousan, stepping forward once their party came into the circle of light and the others had set down their burdens. “Grant us respite and shelter, for as you can see we are holy sisters and brothers of the church, like you, who seek a moment’s rest befo
re we go on our way.”
“You are not like me.” The priest’s upper lip turned up with disgust as he looked them over. He had curly hair falling in dark ringlets almost to his shoulders but this angelic attribute did nothing to soften his sneering expression. “You are Daryans. How is it you butcher my language, woman?”
She knew her grammar was good, but he seemed determined to remain unimpressed “I am Sister Rosvita, educated in the Convent of Korvei. I pray pardon if I torture the pronunciation of your words.”
“Just as your people torture the words of our blessed Redeemer and blight the Earth with every manner of heresy. Only among we Arethousans have your false words been strangled and killed. Sergeant Bysantius, what shall we do with them?”
The sergeant had the look of a typical Arethousan, short and stocky, with black hair and a swarthy face, but he had a shrewd expression as he assessed them. He was obviously a man accustomed to measuring the worth of the soldiers he meant to send into battle. “There’s a Daryan army out there, Father, commanded by the usurper and the false mother. How are these few Daryans come here? Did they lose the army that shelters them? If so, how much ransom might we receive from the usurper to get them back?”
“Best to take them to the patriarch in Arethousa,” said the priest.
Sergeant Bysantius’ gaze rested on the pallet and Mother Obligatia’s frail form. “Just so,” he said finally. “We’re pulling out tonight. I haven’t the men to fight a force as large as that one.”
“Surely a dozen good Arethousans can slaughter their entire expedition! They are the feeblest of nations. The lord of Arethousa is the only lord who has stout soldiers and command of the sea.”
“True enough,” agreed Sergeant Bysantius, but there was something mocking in his tone that made Rosvita like but distrust him. “I’ll take these prisoners to the lady of Bavi and she can send them on to the patriarch. What of you, Father? Do you stay and fight?”
“My people expect me to stay. Not even the slaves and murderers who make up the Daryan army dare strike down a man of God! Take what you came for, and go!”
“Very well.” Bysantius turned away and gave orders to his men, who dispersed about their business.
“What did he say?” asked Hanna, and the others crept closer—as much as any of them dared move a single step—as Rosvita told them what she had heard.
A cart rolled up, and after loading sacks of grain, two barrels of oil and two of wine, and a cage of chickens into the back, the soldiers made room for Mother Obligatia’s pallet, braced among the sacks in a way that would, Rosvita noted, offer the old abbess something resembling a more comfortable ride. It appeared that in addition to the provisions, the sergeant had come for recruits. As his party formed up, they prodded into line two frightened young men whose mothers and sweethearts, or sisters, wept in the doorways of their huts.
A pair of soldiers jogged into the village from the direction of the olive grove.
“Sergeant! There’s a patrol of the Daryans, coming this way!”
“Let’s be off, then,” said Bysantius. He had a horse. The rest walked, and so did Rosvita and her companions, trudging along the dusty road at a numbing pace, their way lit by the torches the soldiers carried, until at dawn the sergeant had pity on Rosvita and the coughing Ruoda and allowed them to sit in the back of the cart. Their party moved not swiftly but steadily, pacing the ox, yet as Rosvita stared back down the road up which they’d come she saw no armed band pursuing them. The countryside was sparsely wooded, and quite dry, although the ground was brightened by a spray of flowers.
“It must be spring,” said Ruoda quietly, voice hoarse from coughing. “How long did we walk between the crowns?”
“Three or four months. I don’t know the date.”
The girl sighed, coughed, and shut her eyes.
“Sister Rosvita.” Obligatia was awake; she too examined the road twisting away behind them, the sere hillsides, and the pale blue sky. “Do you think we have escaped the skopos?”
“I pray so. Perhaps the priest put them off. Perhaps Henry’s patrol believed that it had been Arethousan soldiers all along and gave up the chase.”
“In whose hands will we find safety?”
Rosvita could only shake her head. “I don’t know.”
They marched inland at this leisurely pace for three days, stopping each night in another village where they gathered new provisions to replace what they ate as well as a pair or three of reluctant recruits. Once an old man spat at the sergeant, cursing in a language Rosvita did not recognize. Gerwita screamed as Bysantius stabbed the offender, then left his body hanging from an olive tree, a feast for crows.
“I wonder if we would have found more mercy at the hands of the skopos,” said Hanna that night where they settled down to sleep in a cramped stable, enjoying the luxury of hay for their bed and cold porridge and goat cheese for their supper.
“Learn the artifices of the Arethousans and from one crime know them all,” muttered Fortunatus.
The sergeant kept a watch posted on them all night, and in the morning they set out again.
Today Sergeant Bysantius gave up his horse and during the course of the morning walked beside the wagon.
“So, Sister,” he said, “how comes the usurper to these lands? Why does he wish to rob us of what rightfully belongs to another?”
“You must know I cannot speak in traitorous terms of my countryman and liege lord. I pray you, do not press me for information which I cannot in good conscience give. Even if I knew it, which I do not.”
He grinned. He had good teeth, and merry eyes when he was smiling. “The Daryan soldiers that come marching in that army weren’t just of the old city where the heretics will burn. They say the new Emperor of Dar is a northern man, an ill-mannered barbarian.”
She smiled blandly knowing better than to rise to this trivial bait.
“He’s a Wendishman, they say, king of the north. The masters like to say that Daryans and northerners are louts and liars, goat-footed and braying like asses. I’ve seen them fight, though.”
“Have you fought against them?”
He grinned again but did not answer, instead calling for his horse in a language she did not recognize, and for the first time it occurred to Rosvita that Sergeant Bysantius, like her, spoke Arethousan without the pure accent that the priest had scorned her for lacking.
2
IN early afternoon the Garters dumped Ivar out of the wagon beside the appointed meeting place, but it was only after they had rumbled away and their voices had faded into the distance that a young man stepped out from behind the massive oak tree that dominated the clearing. He was slender, with pale hair, and carried a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other.
“You’re Brother Ivar,” the soldier said. “I recognize you.”
Ivar spat out the tiny scroll concealed in his mouth, then groaned as he staggered, trying to catch his balance, and sat down hard instead. His limbs still weren’t working right. “How can you recognize me? I don’t know you.”
“It’s the red hair. I was there when you were brought by the prior of Hersford Monastery to stand before Duchess Sabella for judgment.”
“Ah.” The memory of that humiliating day still made him hot with anger. The other man—no older than himself—squatted beside him. Ivar squinted at him, finding that his eyes hurt and his back ached and that he had a headache starting in like a mallet trying to pound its way out of his skull. “I don’t recognize you.”
“I’m called Erkanwulf. I belong to Captain Ulric’s troop. We served Biscop Constance, and now—” Here his tone crept lower, ragged with disgust. “—now we serve Lady Sabella, whether we will it or no.”
“Had you a choice in the matter?”
“Captain Ulric told us we’d a choice whether to stick with him or go back to our homes. He said we had a chance to bide our time and wait for the right moment to restore Biscop Constance. He said if we rebelled against Lady Sabella now,
we’d be killed.”
“So he chose to be prudent.”
Erkanwulf shrugged. “That’s one way to put it. We could have ridden to Osterburg. That’s where they say Princess Theophanu has gone to ground. She’s made herself duchess of Saony what with her father gone south and her sister and brother lost in the east.”
“Why didn’t you do that?”
“Captain Ulric said he wanted us to stick close by the biscop, so that we might keep an eye on her, in her prison. Make sure she remains safe. Now that the king has abandoned us for the foreigners in the south, there’s no one else to aid her. Here, now, let’s get you out of the sun.”
He helped Ivar to his feet and led him to the shelter of the little chapel, which was no more than a curved stone wall roofed with thatch, open on one side to the air. The remains of a larger structure lay half buried in the earth around it. Inside the chapel a log had been split and each half planed smooth of splinters to make a bench; Ivar collapsed gratefully onto one of these seats. The altar consisted of little more than a mighty stump greater even than that of the remaining oak giant that dominated the clearing. A big iron ring affixed to an iron stake had been driven into the center of the stump, and spring flowers woven into a wreath garlanded the ring. A wooden tray had been set on the stump, laden with an offering of dried figs, nuts, and a pungent cheese that made Ivar’s headache worse.
He was trying to remember what had happened to Sapientia and Ekkehard, but they had vanished with the rest of Prince Bayan’s army that awful night, and he and his companions had found themselves adrift and lost, three years of traveling swept away in a single night punctuated by blue fire.