In the Ruins

  The older man clipped the younger one on the head to silence him. “Nay, Your Majesty. He’ll tell you all manner of wild tales. This is what happened. The tempest made the land shake and the shoreline fall away. Or the sea fall. I don’t know which. You’ll see by daylight that there’s no seagoing boats drawn up on the strand below, as there used to be.”

  “Indeed. Gent is known for its trade and its many workshops. The river seems to be flowing well enough.”

  “So it appears, but the course changed.”

  “It’s a league farther to the sea than it was before!” said the lad.

  “How can that be?”

  “Not a league, Your Majesty, but a good long way. There were two channels before. One wasn’t deep enough before to take seagoing vessels. Now even the deeper channel dried up. Not even silted, just went dry. Boats couldn’t come through, it was a swamp, no more than an elbow deep. After the winter, the river cut a new path to the sea, many fingers but none of them deep. There’s talk of building a new port out by the shore where ships can put in, mayhap carting goods overland to Gent. Digging a canal. Yet if we lose our trade, I don’t know how the city will thrive.”

  “There’s been no ships anyway,” said the lad. “None at all, and winter’s over and sailing season ought to have begun. The fishermen—those who survived—say the tides have changed and the winds are fierce out there. That it isn’t safe to be on the water. That creatures swim there that will tear boats into pieces with their claws and eat the men who fall into the water.”

  “Whsst! Stop telling stories, boy!”

  “Nay, let him speak, Grandfather. Stories may hold a grain of truth. Yet Gent seems prosperous.”

  “As long as the stores hold out, Your Majesty. Biscop Suplicia and Lady Leoba are good stewards. I pray Lady Leoba will not go riding after the princess again, God save her, for she watched over us well enough and with the biscop’s aid set aside grain against famine. That’s what’s held us. Yet if there’s no crop and no trade this year …”

  He could not go on.

  “It would be God’s will,” muttered the lad. “Punishment for turning away from the truth of the phoenix.”

  “Hush!” The old fellow slapped him in the head again.

  “I did not know,” murmured Sanglant.

  The wind came up suddenly out of the north, spilling over the parapet, rattling along the rooftops.

  “Like that,” the old guard said. “A north wind like that, it never used to come this time of year. Weather’s changed. The winds aren’t the same as they was used to be, in the days before.”

  “Everything’s changed,” whispered the lad, then hunched his shoulders, waiting for a blow that did not come.

  “I did not realize the tides of destruction had washed so high.” Sanglant leaned out over the wall, breathing in the murmur of the air. The night’s presence poured over him. The whole wide world lay beyond. It stretched to every horizon, covered in darkness, unseen and unknowable without moon or stars to light the land.

  A battle might be fought and won in a day, but the ebb and flow of the sea and the heavens never ceased. What had been set in motion might not trough, or peak, for weeks or months or years. The riptide might already be dragging them under while they never knew they were drowning.

  Out of the night a deep hoot trembled. Grit slipped under his sandals as he turned, trying to pinpoint the sound.

  “Whsst!” said the old guard. “That’s an owl! Did you hear it?”

  “Is that a good omen?” asked the lad plaintively. “Or an evil one?”

  “I’ve not seen feather or beak of a bird these last months,” the old man said, then shrieked and ducked as a huge owl skimmed out of the darkness right over their heads and with a graceful plummet came to roost on the wall. Its massive claws dug into the wood. By lantern light, its amber eyes gleamed boldly, seeming lit from within. The light set off the streaks of white on its breast and the tufted ears.

  “What is this?” asked Sanglant.

  It blinked.

  “Where is your mistress?” he demanded.

  But all he heard was the wind.

  PART FOUR

  THE MOUNTAIN OF THE WORLD’S BEGINNING

  XIII

  BLOOD

  1

  WHEN winter turned to spring and the village deacon sang the mass in honor of St. Thecla’s witnessing of the Ekstasis and Translatus of the blessed Daisan, the folk of Osna village met after mass to discuss the summer’s journeying to other ports.

  For months Alain had been ill and weak and weary, unable to do more than sleep, eat the gruel Aunt Bel cooked him, and sit beside the hearth dozing with Sorrow and Rage stretched out on either side. He had suffered from the lung fever; a terrible infection had inflamed his right foot; he had battled recurring headaches.

  In the end, Aunt Bel’s nursing defeated these afflictions.

  Now he walked with only a slight limp as he accompanied Henri to the church in the afternoon. It was cold and, as usual, cloudy.

  “We haven’t seen the sun for months,” remarked Henri. “The winter wheat never sprouted. I fear the spring planting won’t get sun and warmth enough to grow if the weather doesn’t change. There’ll be famine.”

  “There already is.”

  Henri glanced at him but made no comment.

  Sorrow and Rage had gamboled ahead. They rushed back, nipping at each other and running in circles. Aunt Bel and her daughter Stancy walked in front of them. Bel’s other surviving children, Julien and Bruno and Agnes, trailed behind, laughing over the antics of Julien’s younger child, a chubby toddler named Conrad but called Pig by one and all for his love of mud.

  “Eeuw!” squealed Pig’s older sister, Blanche, now eight or nine. “Eeuw. Pig’s throwing it at me again, Papa! Make him stop! I hate him! He’s awful!”

  “Don’t you touch him!” cried the baby’s mother. “If you will provoke him, it’s no wonder he throws mud at you!”

  “Do stop, Blanche,” agreed Agnes. “He’s just a baby.”

  “Come walk with me, Blanche.” Alain held out his hand, and she ran to him and clutched his fingers. She was a pale, frightened, resentful creature, motherless since birth. The wife Julien had brought home from Varingia did not like her, and Blanche returned the favor.

  “I hate that pig stinker,” she muttered, eyeing Alain sidelong to see if he would respond. “And her, too. I hate everyone, and they all hate me.”

  He did not respond, although her unhappiness gave him pain. In truth, she was an unlikable girl who struck out at others and bullied younger children. It seemed to be the only way she knew to battle her wounded heart.

  He sighed, and she sniffled but kept silent, unwilling to offend the only person who offered her more than perfunctory kindness. His attention strayed. Aunt Bel’s scarf hadn’t lost that particular twist she gave to the knot that made it hang somewhat to the left. Stancy was pregnant again, tired but hale. Her husband Artald was already at the church door talking with several men from the village. Their agitated voices rose as a local woodsman regaled them with a tale.

  “It was so quiet all autumn and winter I thought we’d done with these refugees plaguing us,” exclaimed old Gilles Fisher, cutting the other man off. “Yet now they come. We haven’t enough to feed them. I say we gather staves and drive them out.”

  “Fotho says it’s mostly women and children and old folk,” objected Artald. “It doesn’t seem right.”

  “It was women and children and old folk last year and the year before, too, what with the Salian war going on and on and before that Eika raids.”

  “Nay, it was better last year,” said Artald. “Not so many came north, and then only in early summer. They were caught down there in the border country.”

  Agnes stifled a sob.

  “What’s this?” asked Aunt Bel. “I smell a drizzle coming on. Let’s go inside so we don’t get wet.”

  In they all marched. Sister Corinthia presided because
the old deacon had died two years ago and the count’s father had sent no one to replace her. That Aunt Bel had had the foresight to keep a cleric in her house to educate her grandchildren had given her immense prestige in Osna village now that Sister Corinthia led all the services. The cleric had even picked out two village children bright enough to be educated at St. Thierry.

  The young cleric led them in a dozen psalms before stepping aside to let Bel stand up.

  “Have you some news for all of us, Fotho? I pray you, speak loudly and clearly so we can all hear. Hilde, take the children outside and watch them.”

  Hilde was Stancy’s eldest, a stout, well grown girl about the same age as Blanche but of an entirely opposite disposition. She herded out a score of mewling, giggling, restless children, some older than she was. Silence descended as the score of adults regarded first each other and then the quiet woodsman who shuffled forward to stand on the first step of the dais where they could all see and hear him. Everyone was sitting on fine benches built in Aunt Bel’s workshop. Blanche clung to Alain, and he let her crawl up onto his lap, the only child who hadn’t gone outside.

  “Refugees,” said Fotho. “Come up the coast road. Not a man over twelve or under forty among ’em. They’re wearing nothing but rags—if they have clothes at all, which most of the children don’t. They’re starving. They come up out of Salia. They say there’s fighting along the border again. No food to be had.”

  “Is it Eika?” asked Agnes tremulously.

  “They’re not out of Medemelacha way, if that’s what you’re asking, lass,” said Fotho kindly, and with some warmth. He was a decent-looking young man a few years older than Agnes. He had a yen for her, as everyone knew, but it was a hopeless case even though Agnes was now considered to be a widow after only a year of marriage.

  “Is it even safe to sail to Medemelacha?” asked Gilles Fisher. He was too crippled with arthritis to sail or even to build ships, but his keen mind and store of knowledge were precious to the community.

  “That’s one of the questions we must ask and answer,” said Henri. “It was safe last year, even with the emporium under the rule of that Eika lord.”

  Agnes wiped away a tear, glanced at Fotho, and dropped her gaze to the ground.

  “It doesn’t sound as if these refugees will give us any trouble,” said Artald. “I say we let them move on. They can beg at Lavas Holding.”

  “Hah! As if Lord Geoffrey has aught to give them, or as if he would!” It was Mistress Garia’s truculent son who spoke, but he had the decency to blush as every person there looked at Alain and away as quickly. “We’ve not heard a word from Lavas Holding for six months. Hung us out to dry, the lord has.”

  “What do you suggest, then?” asked Stancy. “We haven’t enough to feed every soul who comes begging.”

  “If you turn no one away, there will be enough,” said Alain.

  They fell silent. Blanche sucked a dirty thumb, eyes wide and expression fierce. The light through the glass window washed the floor in five colors, according to the panes: there was red, and a pale green, as well as yellow, blue, and smoky violet. Because the bay of the church faced east, the sun shone through the glass window in the morning. Now, at midday, there was no direct light, but it was still bright enough with the doors flung wide to see the murals painted along each side of the nave. There, the blessed Daisan at the fire where he first encountered the vision of the Circle of Unity. And again, the blessed Daisan with his followers refusing to kneel and worship before the Dariyan empress Thaissania, she of the mask. The seven miracles, each depicted in loving detail. Last of all the eye might rest upon the blessed Daisan lying dead at the Hearth from which his spirit was lifted up through the seven spheres to the Chamber of Light. Beside him, St. Thecla the Witnesser wept, her tears feeding the sanctified cup.

  Once he had seen brave scenes of battle hiding beneath the lamplit murals, but now he saw only suffering and it made him angry, and it made him sad.

  Sister Corinthia cleared her throat. “Spiritually, you speak what we all know to be true, friend Alain. The church mothers teach that every heart is a rose, and that to turn away from those in need when you could aid them causes the rose to wither. In this same way, plants need water to live, and we need breath. But in truth …” She faltered and looked to Aunt Bel for help.

  “One loaf cannot feed one hundred starving beggars,” said Aunt Bel. “Wishing does not make it so.”

  “Which one will you refuse?” he asked Bel. “Let it be your choice. And if not yours, then whose? Who will volunteer to be the one who chooses which supplicant lives and which dies?”

  No one answered him.

  “Yet your Aunt Bel is right,” said Henri later as they readied the boats for sailing. “If we give all our stores away, we’ll starve, too. That seems not just foolish but stubborn.”

  Below the house, workshops, and gardens lay a narrow trail that led to the boat shed, built two years ago. They rolled the new boat down to the tiny beach and pushed it out onto the water. Julien and Bruno set the sail and put out into the bay to test the waters while Henri and Alain remained behind to look over the old boat, always in need of repairs. Alain slid under the boat, which was propped up on logs. The work came easily to his hands. The smell of sheep’s wool greased with tar made memories swim in his mind of the days long before when Henri had taught him the skills of shore and boat.

  Inspecting his work, Henri grunted. “Well, Son, you haven’t forgotten how to fasten a loose plank. Here. There’s another spot.”

  They worked in companionable silence. Alain ran his hands over each fingerbreadth of the hull while Henri replaced the leather lining and hemp rope that secured the rudder to the boss. A gull screeked. Water slurped among the rocks.

  From the boat shed, angled to take advantage of the view, they could see north over the sound. The eastern islands floated on gray waters. The distant promontory shielding Osna village gleamed darkly, and beyond it to the northwest lay ragged shoreline and white breakers where once the vast Dragonback Ridge had vaulted. A flash of sail skimmed the bay to the north.

  “Rain,” said Henri, pausing, hands still, to stare across the waters.

  The smell of salt and tar and wet wool caught in Alain’s mind, and he was swept as by the tide into memory.

  Two slender ships skim up onto the strand. Scale-skinned creatures pour out of them. They cannot be called men, and their fierce, horrible dogs cannot be called dogs, but there are no other words to describe them. They burn as they go, destroying the monastery and the hapless brothers.

  There is one who watches with him, her gaze sharp and merciless. “It is too late for them,” she says.

  “No!” He jerked back, slamming his head against the boat.

  “Alain?”

  “She is the enemy,” he said raggedly. His head pounded. Stabs of pain afflicted him, waking that old headache that had caused his blindness and muteness.

  “Who is the enemy?”

  “The one who says, ‘This is as it must be, we can’t do anything else even if we want to.”’

  “Do you speak so of your aunt?”

  “No, no.” He rubbed his head. Spots and flurries of light blurred his vision. “Of the one I met on the road.”

  “What one?”

  “The Lady of Battles.”

  “Who is the Lady of Battles? Are you well, Alain? Is your headache back? Maybe we’d better go back to the hall and let you rest.”

  “What was my mother like?”

  There came a silence from Henri and only the answer of the land around them: the hiss of surf, the wind in leaves, a branch snapping under the weight of Rage’s paw, a distant shout of laughter, a bird’s warble, quickly hushed. The ache in his head faded as he breathed, waiting.

  After a bit, he felt Henri move, then heard the noise of the file as Henri worked to shave the curve of a wooden plug to the exact fit for its oar port, to replace one eaten away by dry rot. Alain leaned back against the boat
, recalling the familiar comfort of familiar patterns. Henri had always had a habit of thinking as he worked, or perhaps it was better to say that working helped him think, that the motion of hands teased patterns of thought into symmetry.

  The hounds snuffled into the woods. The sea sighed.

  “Is that what drove you?” Henri asked at last. “Seeking your mother?”

  “I admit I have always wondered.”

  The file scraped at the wood.

  “Not so much about my mother,” Alain continued. “What she might have been like, of course I always wondered that. Yet if a birth is witnessed, and the witnesses tell the truth, there’s no doubt of a mother’s identity. It was wondering who my father was that drove me.”

  The file stilled. “Do you wonder that still?”

  Alain shifted to look into Henri’s face. He took Henri’s seamed, callused hand in his own and held it tightly. “No. I know who my father is. He is the one who raised me and cherished me.”

  Tears fell, although Henri wept silently. One coursed down his cheek to land softly on the back of Alain’s hand, a warm salty drop followed by

  “No good song is ever sung of a traitor,” he says to Deacon Ursuline.

  “It is not treachery. It is an alliance,” she objects.

  He sits and she stands in the hall built by his Alban carpenters to replace the one that burned in last year’s assault on Hefenfelthe. Most of his court have retired to their beds for the night, but he is, as always, wakeful, and Deacon Ursuline is persistent.

  Torches burn in sconces bracketed every three strides along the wall. The tang of smoke licks at him, reminding him of scorched timbers and dying men. His dogs whine from their corner. No doubt they dream of the slaughter which feeds them.

  “That is the point in keeping the old royal lineage alive now that the rest are dead,” she continues mercilessly. “If you marry the eldest princess, then it will bind the Alban people closer to you.”

  “She will have turned against her ancestors, the queens, if she agrees to such an arrangement. She was to be the sacrifice to death, not to life.”