“You!” said the girl with a roll of her eyes. She grinned at Ivar. She was plump, healthy, very attractive, and well aware of her charms.
“And a monk besides,” Erkanwulf added.
“As if that ever stopped a man!” She laughed. She had lovely blue eyes, deep enough to drown in, as the poets would say, and she fixed that gaze on Ivar so hard that he blushed.
“Hush, you, Daughter,” said Erkanwulf’s mother. “Don’t embarrass me before this holy man. I beg your pardon, Your Excellency.”
“No offense taken,” Ivar said awkwardly.
The mother swung her gaze from the one to the other. It was difficult to say who blanched more, the sister or the brother. “What are you doing here, Erkanwulf? There came the lady’s riders looking for you last autumn. We had a good deal of trouble because of your disobedience. Best you have a good reason for bringing her wrath down on us.”
“What trouble?” He looked around the circle of villagers gathered and saw that their mood was sour, not welcoming.
When she did not answer, he said, “We can trust this man. I swear to you on my father’s grave.”
She held up a hand and folded down one digit for each offense. “Steward was taken back to Autun with both her son and daughter, as hostage for our good behavior. Bruno and Fritho were whipped for protesting. Your brother and four cousins took to the woods and hide there still, like common bandits, because the lady’s riders said they’d hold them as hostage against your return. Goodwife Margaret’s two grandsons were led off God know where, although they said they meant to make them grooms in the lady’s stables.” The crone bobbed her head vigorously. “How is Margaret to plow her fields now? You best make a good accounting for yourself, Son, for as bad as all that is,” and now she folded in her thumb, and shook a fist at him, “we lost also our entire store of salted venison meant to husband us through to spring. They took it as tax, a fine levied against your desertion. New year is coming. Our stores grow thin. Much of what remains is rotting. What with this cold weather, too much rain all winter, and no sun for these many weeks, I fear more trouble to come. What do you say?”
“He came at my order,” said Ivar, “and in the service of Biscop Constance.”
Folk murmured. Some drew the circle at their breast while others made the sign to avert the evil eye.
“She’s dead, may God have mercy on her,” said Erkanwulf’s mother.
“She’s not dead but living in a monastery they call Queen’s Grave.”
“That’s what they said. That she was interred in Queen’s Grave.”
“It’s a place, not a graveyard,” he said patiently, seeing that the villagers had lost a bit of the suspicion that closed their features. “It’s a convent. She’s alive. Lady Sabella deposed her, although she had no legal right to do so since Biscop Constance was given her place as both biscop and duke by the regnant himself.”
“King Henry is Wendish,” said one of the men who had greeted them so suspiciously by the byre. “As is the biscop. At least Lady Sabella is daughter of the old Varren royal family on her mother’s side.”
“She’s a heretic,” said Erkanwulf’s mother. “Our deacon was taken away because she wouldn’t profess.”
“Was she? Has the truth come so far as out here to this place?” demanded Ivar.
“He’s a heretic, too,” observed Erkanwulf dryly, indicating Ivar.
“Hush, you,” said his mother before turning her attention back to Ivar. “It’s true enough, Your Excellency. The lady came riding by on her progress one fine day last spring.”
“It was summer,” interrupted Erkanwulf’s sister. “I recall it because the borage was blooming and it was the same color as his eyes.”
“Tssh! Hush, girl! We heard enough about all that back then. I beg pardon, Your Excellency. My children will rattle on. The lady prayed with us, and said if we professed the Redemption she’d send us salt and spices in the autumn. But none came. Because of your disobedience, Erkanwulf!”
“Still,” said her daughter, with a dreamy smile, “I liked listening to what the lady’s cleric had to say.”
“Because of his blue eyes!” said the old crone with a wheezy laugh. “Ah, to be young!”
“I am surrounded by fools!” cried the chatelaine, but even her expression softened as she allowed herself a moment’s recollection. “Yet it’s true he was the handsomest man I’ve ever seen. More like an angel than a man, truly. And so soft-spoken, with a sorrow in his heart. Why, his good counsel softened even old Marius’ heart and he patched up his ancient quarrel with his cousin William that they’d been nursing for twenty years.”
“That was a miracle!” observed the crone wryly. “And he was handsome! Whsst!”
“You’re the fools!” cried Erkanwulf, for whom this recital had become, evidently and all at once, too much to bear. “There can only be one young lord fitting that description, and he’s no cleric. He’s the lady’s kept man, her concubine. She beds him every night, and parades him during the day like a holy saint wanting only a shower of light to transport him up to the Chamber of Light!”
“You’re just jealous because Nan wouldn’t roll you!” retorted his angry sister.
“At least she doesn’t bed every man who comes asking!”
Everyone began talking at once, as many laughing as scolding, but his mother walked right over to him and slapped him. “You’ll speak no such disrespectful words, young pup! Nor have you explained yourself yet! Steward put herself out for you because she liked you and thought well of you. Now look where it’s gotten her! Speak up! The rest of you shut your mouths and listen!”
No captain could have controlled his unruly band of soldiers more efficiently. They quieted, coughed, crossed arms, shushed children, scuffed feet in the dirt, and waited for Erkanwulf to start.
Ivar forestalled him by raising a hand. “I’ll speak.”
“Begging your pardon,” said the chatelaine hastily, as he’d known she would. He was a churchman, but in addition he sat mounted on a fine horse, and carried a sword.
“I escaped from Queen’s Grave with the aid of Erkanwulf, here, and his captain.”
“Hush!” muttered Erkanwulf. “I won’t have him getting in trouble.”
“He’ll be in trouble soon enough,” said Ivar.
“What trouble?” demanded the chatelaine. “Are you speaking of Captain Ulric? He’s a good man, local to these parts. I want you to make no trouble for him.”
“You’ll make no trouble for him if you’ll bide quietly once we’ve left and say no word of our passing. We rode to Princess Theophanu—”
“That’s one of the Wendish royals,” said one of the old fellows wisely, and gained a clout on the backside from the crone.
“Hush, you! Let the brother speak!”
“Do you live better under the rule of Lady Sabella than you did under Biscop Constance?” he asked them.
One by one they frowned and considered until the chatelaine said, grudgingly, “Biscop Constance ruled fairly. If she promised a thing, then it was delivered. The lady’s companions take what they wish when they want and tax us according to how the fit takes them.”
“Who rules in Wendar and Varre?” he asked.
“Sabella’s daughter rules in Varre,” they agreed, “together with her husband, the Wayland duke, the one with burned skin. Conrad the Black.”
“You’d accept the rule of Lady Tallia over that of the rightful regnant, King Henry?”
“What kind of kinship does Henry hold to us? It’s his elder sister Sabella who is born out of the Varren royal house. Not Henry. He was born to a Wendish mother, nothing to do with us. He never came here anyway. Once or twice to Autun. That’s all. It’s nothing to do with us.”
“I don’t like that heresy,” said the chatelaine.
Several others murmured agreement.
“The story of the Redemption sounded fair enough to me,” said Erkanwulf’s sister, then flushed. “And not just because
of that cleric.”
“This one is a heretic, too, so ’Wulf says,” replied the crone. “So what’s to choose between them? Is all the royals heretics now?”
“No, not all of them,” said Ivar reluctantly, seeing by their expressions that he could not win this battle using his careful arguments. They were not Wendish. He was. In a way, he had already lost.
“I’d stand up for Duke Conrad,” said the old man. “He’s of good blood even with that foreign creature that gave birth to him, but the old duke, Conrad the Elder, was his father. Nay, I say enough with the Wendish. Let them plough their own fields and leave ours to us who are born out of Varren soil.”
“So be it,” said Ivar. “Come, Erkanwulf. We’d best ride now, while we’ve still light.” He turned his attention to the chatelaine, who made no gesture to encourage them to stay. “I pray you, give us a loaf and cheese. If all goes well, and you aid us by keeping silence, we’ll rid you of the Wendish now biding on Varren earth.”
“What did you mean, back there?” Erkanwulf demanded as they rode out not long after. He was surly, having argued again with his sister and gotten only a perfunctory kiss from his mother. “‘Rid Varren soil of those from Wendar.’ I thought we meant to aid Biscop Constance! I can’t help that those fools back there don’t see her for what she is—a finer steward by far than Lady Sabella!”
“No use arguing with them. They can’t help us anyway. In truth, if many of you Varrens feel the same way, then we must act quickly. I thought there might be many who hated Lady Sabella’s rule. Those villagers by Queen’s Grave were willing enough to help us.”
“They have to feed and house the guards. At least two girls from that village was abused by the guards, if the story I heard is true. The folk there have no reason to love Lady Sabella. But as for others—what is one regnant to them, compared to another? They pay tithes either way, and live at the mercy of the weather and bandits and wolves and what measure of taxes the stewards take on behalf of the nobles each year.”
“Surely they must have seen that Biscop Constance was a fair ruler?”
Erkanwulf shrugged. “How many winters did she rule in Autun? The local folk know only that some Wendish noble was set in place by the Wendish king. We Varrens have no reason to love the Wendish, my lord. That’s an old grudge, for sure.”
“Yet you and your captain and his men were willing to aid Biscop Constance in getting a messenger out.”
“We took her measure, my lord, when we served her in Autun. We know her for what she is. But there’s war in Salia now. Our borders are at risk. Captain Ulric may no longer be barracked in Autun. He may have been sent southwest to fight. Or he may refuse to help us now. Maybe he’s done as much as he’s willing to do to aid Biscop Constance. I don’t know. Duke Conrad is fair to soldiers. He’s a good man to fight for.”
“Surely you know Captain Ulric well enough to know what’s in his mind! He sent you to aid me, after all.”
“We’ve been gone for months. Things have changed.”
They rode in silence for a while along the path that cut through woods. Ash and sycamore swayed softly among oak and beech and hornbeam. It was cloudy, as always these days, and cold and dry. The rains of last autumn had evidently poured all their moisture into the earth in the space of a month or so of incessant rain, Over the winter there had been little snow, although the clouds never lifted, and in time the roads had dried enough for Ivar and Erkanwulf to set off again from their refuge in the Bretwald.
“I didn’t like leaving,” said Erkanwulf after a while.
“What? Your village? They didn’t treat you very nicely.”
“Nay, not them. You see why I left! No, I liked that steading in the Bretwald. They were good, decent, kind people. That’s the kind of place I’d like to settle down, not that I’m likely to.”
“What do you mean? Settle in Bretwald?”
Erkanwulf was about the same age as Ivar, not as tall, and lanky in the way of a young man who never quite got enough food as he could eat growing up. He was tough—Ivar knew that—but he shrugged like a man defeated. “If I leave Captain Ulric’s company, I’ll have to go back to my village and let my mother make a marriage for me. Who else would have me? I’d be an outlaw if I left the place I’m bound to by birth.”
“They took in strangers in the Bretwald.”
“That’s true. Refugees from Gent. I liked it there, with no lord holding a sword over their head and telling them what to do.”
“Until bandits realize how wide that road is, and attack them who have no lord to defend them.”
“They’d need more hands, then, wouldn’t they? A man who had some experience fighting would be of use to them.” Erkanwulf brooded as they moved through the woods. No birds sang. Except for the murmuring wind and the soft fall of their horses’ hooves, there was no sound at all. The quiet made Ivar nervous. He hadn’t felt quite right since that terrible night when wind and rain had battered them and killed Erkanwulf’s horse. They had commandeered the old nag Erkanwulf rode from a village whose name Ivar had already forgotten. Those folk hadn’t greeted them kindly, but they’d offered them shelter and given up the old mare in exchange for some of Princess Theophanu’s coin. Those villagers didn’t love the Wendish either, and with King Henry gone so long from his usual progress around the countryside, they saw no reason not to turn their hearts toward the old stories of Varren queens and kings who had once ruled these lands without any Wendish overlord telling them what to do.
A long time ago, so it seemed, he had been young and thoughtless. He smiled, thinking back on it. Perhaps not so long ago. But so much had happened. He had been thrown headlong into a world whose contours were more complicated than he had ever imagined as the neglected youngest child of the old count up in Heart’s Rest.
“For all I know, my father is dead by now, and my brother Gero become count in his place.”
Erkanwulf glanced at him, his expression unreadable. “What has that to do with us? My lord?”
“Nay, nothing. I just thought of it. I just thought how the world is changed, as you said yourself. Not just because of that storm or Biscop Constance’s imprisonment, or any of those things, but because I left my father’s estate and journeyed farther than I ever expected to go. I can’t be that youth that I once was. When I think of how I was then … I don’t know. It’s just different now. We’ve chosen our path. We can’t go back.”
“Huh. True enough words.”
“What do you think we’ll find in Autun?” Ivar asked.
Erkanwulf only sighed. “I hope we find what we’re looking for. Whatever that may be.”
2
IT snowed the morning they crossed the river on the ferry and moved into a straggle of woodland near the southern gate of Autun. They stumbled over two corpses half hidden under branches and mostly decomposed. Skulls leered at them, so they moved on. In the ruins of an old cottage abandoned among the trees, they stabled the horses with fodder and water, tying their thread-worn blankets over the animals’ backs. After that, they trudged overland to the city walls. No pristine stretches of fresh white snow blanketed the fields. It was all a muddy gray.
They passed several clusters of huts and cottages, shutters closed and doors shut against the cold. No one was about. Once they heard a goat’s bleat; once a child’s weary wailing dogged them before fading into the distance.
Erkanwulf led them first along the river and thence to a postern gate. They approached cautiously, hoods cast up over their faces. Ivar hung back as Erkanwulf strode forward to confront the two men hanging about on guard.
A conversation ensued; he knew them. After a moment he beckoned Ivar forward and without further conversation they were hustled past the gates and into the alleys of the city. Autun was a vast metropolis; Sigfrid had told him that perhaps ten thousand people lived there, cheek by jowl, but Ivar wasn’t sure he believed it. That was an awful lot of people, too many to comprehend. Even Prince Bayan and Princess Sapientia
’s combined armies hadn’t numbered more than ten or fifteen centuries of soldiers in addition to auxiliaries and militia.
On this late winter afternoon, few braved the streets. In one square a trio of beggars huddled by a public fountain, hands and faces wrapped in rags to protect themselves from the bitter cold. The tiny child’s face was thin from hunger, and he scooted forward on his rump, like a cripple without use of his legs, to catch the copper coin Ivar tossed to them.
“Bless you, Brother!” the mother croaked, surprised.
“Where the phoenix flies, there is hope of salvation,” he said to her.
Her face lit. “Truth rises with the phoenix!” she answered triumphantly. “Bless you! Bless you!”
Unnerved, he hurried after Erkanwulf, who had not waited.
“We’re trying to come in quietly,” scolded the young soldier when Ivar caught up to him. “Don’t leave a trail.”
“They were hungry.”
“Everyone is hungry! A coin will gain them bread today, if there’s any to be had, but nothing tomorrow.”
“God enjoin us to ease suffering where we can. What is that she said about the phoenix?”
“Hush.”
They hurried across a broader avenue and stood in the narrow alley waiting for a score of mounted soldiers wearing the stallion of Wayland to pass before they scurried through the sludge to a narrow path between two-storied wood houses. The walls tilted awkwardly, shadowing their path, and the shadows made it almost as dim as twilight as they sidestepped refuse left lying in the cracked mud. Because it was cold, it did not stink, but it would, when spring brought warm weather.
“I’ll never get used to cities,” muttered Ivar.
“It’s not so bad,” said Erkanwulf. “A man’s freer here, where he can get rid of his past. And safer too, inside walls.”
“Only if those who are guarding you are trustworthy.”
His companion chuckled. “True enough. Wait here.” He left Ivar.
The side street debouched into a square at whose center stood a post where men could be tied for whipping. Beyond that lay the barracks; Ivar recognized them from his brief visit to Autun two years back. It was getting dark in truth. An aura of red lined the western sky, what he could discern of it beyond buildings and in the shadow of the clouds. Erkanwulf’s cloaked figure skulking at the barracks door, and vanishing inside, was rather like that of the shades they’d encountered in the forest that awful night last autumn. Ivar shuddered and wrapped his cloak more tightly around his torso as the chill of night crept into his bones. He’d been cold for a long time, and when he stood still he felt it most of all.