King's Dragon

  A prince rides with his retinue through a dark forest. A mountain rises in the distance, touched at its height by the smoky gray of the mountain’s breath eking into the twilit sky. A shield hangs from the prince’s saddle: a red rose against a sable background.

  Rodlin took him by the arm and tugged him out of the chamber while behind Count Lavastine discussed with his captain and kin and retainers his plans for the autumn and winter building and for the introduction of a new, heavier plough for breaking new fields in forest country.

  A red rose on a shield. Of course the vision had been a true one. He had only to be patient.

  In the castle yard, waiting while Rodlin spoke with Sergeant Fell, Alain brushed his fingers over his tunic. The younger soldiers lounged at their ease around the yard. Having nothing better to do, they stared at him and whispered among themselves.

  Even through the cloth the rose felt warm to his touch, as if she, knowing somehow that he was to train as a soldier, was pleased. He shivered, though the day was warm. He felt blessed, indeed, to be granted his heart’s wish. But he wondered now how safe it was to have come to the notice of such a power, whether she had been a dead saint walking abroad on Earth or the angel of war descended from the realm of the stars to mark out her champion … or her next victim.

  IV

  THE TREASURE-

  HOUSE

  1

  WHAT she hated most about Hugh was the way he watched her constantly. He was waiting. The effort of simply guarding her tongue, her every action, for every moment in the day was exhausting. He was waiting. Sooner or later she would betray herself.

  She hated it most in the evenings after she had finished her work, when she ought to have been free of him at least for the hour between Nones and Vespers, before she settled down on her bed of straw in the pig shed for the night’s sleep. Had he left her alone, she could have observed the heavens, held onto the memory of her old life with Da. But usually Hugh sat up until late on a chair placed out back, watching her, waiting for her to do something that would betray her to him.

  Her only defense was to pretend she knew nothing: Da had taught her no secrets, of the heavens or otherwise; she said nothing when Hugh sat outside with the astrolabe in his hands, turning it over, spinning the alidade, tracing the lines on the plates with his fingers, and obviously having no idea how to use it even to tell time.

  That Hugh, an educated churchman, did not recognize the athar, the spectacle that shone now so brightly in the Dragon that it cast as much light as the quarter moon, appalled her. And frightened her. She had never before realized how forbidden the knowledge of the heavens must be, which she had begun to learn at her Da’s knee as effortlessly as a duck takes to water.

  “Sorcerers and navigators,” Da always said, “study the heavens because they must.”

  Now and again, when she judged she was alone, she observed as well as she could. Da always wrote down his observations in the margins of The Book of Secrets in a tiny, precise hand. She had perforce to write them in her mind.

  “For as it is written in the Memoria of Alisa of Jarrow, ‘Knowledge is a treasure-house and the heart is its strongbox.’ Make of your memory a great city, Liath, and map its streets as if you walked them in your own body. This is your own, your secret city, and in this city place all that you wish to remember, giving each thing a seal or a portrait by which you can recognize it. Each thing shall be set in its rightful place, in its rightful order, and by this means you shall be as wealthy as any king. Knowledge is an incorruptible treasure which can never lose its brightness.”

  So over the years and with much concentration, she had made her memory into an imaginary city she pictured in her mind, so complete that with her eyes shut she could walk through it as though it really existed:

  On a great lake rests an island, perfectly round, its sides sloping gently to a small circular plateau. The city rises upon the island, seven levels ringed by seven walls, each wall painted a different color. Within the uppermost walls, on the plateau, lies a plaza bounded by four buildings, one at each compass point; in the center stands a tower of stone. The observatory, a circular building built of marble, sits on the north-south axis, on the point of north, its eye toward the north star, Kokab, and the constellation known as the Guardian.

  When she stood outside on those summer nights, in the yard between the chapel and the pig shed, and looked up at the heavens, she made a picture in her mind of this observatory, its curved walls, the sighting stones and gaps, the central pillar. She imagined the twelve arches that represented the twelve houses of the zodiac, also known as the Houses of Night, the world dragon that binds the heavens.

  In the house of the Dragon she placed, in her memory, a seastar such as she had once seen in tide pools along the Andallan coast. This seastar with its six arms glowed with a bright white light, like the spectacle. She placed it within the curved archway of the Dragon at fifteen degrees, so that she would always remember at what degree it had resided in the constellation. Around it she affixed imagined seals so she would remember where the Sun and Moon and other planets were, to what degree in which Houses; then in five or twenty years, if she were even alive then, she could show to another mathematicus—another sorcerer trained in the knowledge of the stars—precisely where and when the spectacle had first shone forth.

  But summer passed and, three and a half months after it first appeared, the star faded, its sparking brightness diminishing. She could still see it, a star blended in among the others that made up the constellation of the Dragon, but it was now an ordinary star. Perhaps this was how angels were birthed: a brilliance to announce their nativity followed by the long steady glow of Our Lady’s and Lord’s work. Perhaps it was merely a comet, as mathematici called those stars which had tails and sometimes moved across the sphere of the Sun.

  She had not known until then that she had hoped, somehow, that Da would return, that he was not truly dead, that he would miraculously rescue her. The strange star had shone forth on the night Da died as if it were a harbinger of death; certainly, she realized now, Da had thought of it that way. As the athar faded, so her hope faded. He was dead, gone, passed up through the seven spheres to the Chamber of Light. He wasn’t coming back. She was alone.

  2

  LIATH was turning leaves and manure into the damp ground for next year’s garden when Hugh appeared from the stable, leading his piebald mare. She glanced up at him, but he said nothing and seemed content to watch her work. When she had finished the row, she stopped, leaning on her shovel, and regarded him evenly.

  He smiled, looking pleased with himself. “I’ll be gone for twelve days, north to Freelas to get news from the biscop and to minister to the holdings between here and the town. You may take your meals at the inn while I’m gone. But you will dine with me on Ladysday after next.”

  Liath ducked her chin, in assent. He had ridden to Freelas six weeks ago and been gone eight glorious days. Something in her expression must have given away her feelings. He dropped the mare’s reins and walked forward. Stopping before her, he lifted a very clean, very white hand and brushed her tangled hair, that which had escaped from her braid, back out of her eyes while she held herself stiff.

  “There,” he said, and went back to the mare. He swung on with the leisurely grace of much practice and studied Liath a moment longer from this high seat. “Take a bath. There’s an underdress and a fine long gown in the chest. I want you to wear those when we dine.” He reined the piebald around and rode off to the road and away, north, into the forest. Oddly, for a man wearing a frater’s plain brown robe, split for riding and thrown over a nobleman’s dress of tunic and hose, he wore his long sword strapped to his back.

  Liath finished five more rows before she went to the kitchen to wash her face and hands. The water from the well was cold and getting colder as summer passed into autumn. Oh, yes, the summer had passed easily enough. But it was getting chilly at night. Last night she had been grateful when Trotter
had rolled up against the wood rail set between her dry bed of straw and the pigs’ pen, to give her warmth at her back.

  She sighed and dried her hands on her tunic, then stoked up the fire to keep the great copper pot of porridge simmering. It was a little too hot in the cookhouse, a small building set a few strides away from the sprawling haphazard warren of chambers that had grown out over many years from the chapel. The central core of this warren of rooms had been built, it was said, by a frater from the kingdom of Aosta. Unaccustomed to the cold winters, he had sealed and insulated the timber frame so the building kept in warmth too well. She had probably been more comfortable out in the pig shed this summer than Hugh had been in his cell.

  She sneezed, wiped a scrap of straw from her face, and went outside. Sun shone down on the autumn trees, turned gold and fire-red, and on their taller, evergreen companions. Hugh rode out frequently to make his rounds of the sick and dying and those isolates who simply wanted the comfort of a holy man’s sermons and prayers, but those rounds lasted an afternoon or, at best, a single night. She had not dared, when he rode before to Freelas, to go anywhere or to attempt anything, she had been so sure for all eight of those days that he was simply lurking out of her sight waiting to catch her out. But Hugh did have his duties, and he did carry them out faithfully. This time, perhaps, she could risk the hike up to where Hanna had buried the book.

  She thought of the book constantly. Could hardly fail to, because though Hugh had not spoken of it once this long summer, she knew it was always in his thoughts. She knew it by the way he looked at her, by the way he fingered the other books in front of her, as if to remind her of what she had hidden from him.

  There are degrees of freedom among the unfree. Hugh owned her body. He did not own her mind or her soul. The Book of Secrets still belonged to her.

  She rummaged through the storage rooms until she found a piece of oilcloth and the hand towel. With a last glance up the north road, she set off west into the rolling wooded hills.

  It was fine early autumn weather. As she left behind church and chapel, pig shed and stables, kitchen and garden, she felt a weight lift from her. Hugh’s oppressive presence, everything that reminded her of her loss of freedom—all these, for this short walk, were gone. For this hour, she was no longer chained in the ranks of the unfree. Da would have wept to see her so, knowing that it was his own folly that had forced her into slavery. Poor Da. She wiped away a tear. She was so lonely.

  A bird trilled. A squirrel chirruped and scampered out along a branch. Fallen leaves and summer’s debris cushioned her strides. She sang. It came out husky and low at first, hesitant, then with more confidence; she sang an old song her mother had taught her, words whose meaning she did not know although they had a mellifluous flow that joined with the exotic melody to make beauty. She knew Dariyan well enough that she could guess these words were related to the language of that long-dead empire, for they were some of the same cadences.

  “Liath.”

  She stopped dead. “Hanna?”

  Behind, an animal rustled in the trees. But when she whirled to look, there was nothing there. A trick of the breeze or the wish of her mind. The faint memory of her mother’s voice. That was all. She went on.

  When she came to the clearing where the ancient oak stood, she paused at the edge of the trees and listened for a long time and intently. A bird sang, the same repeated five-note whistle. In the distance she heard a steady, rhythmic chopping, someone out getting wood. Nothing else. She was alone.

  After so long, she was amazed how vividly the book came to mind, how she could feel the texture of its pages against her skin, changing as the reader leafed through the book. For The Book of Secrets was truly three books, bound together.

  The first book was written on parchment in Dariyan, the language of the church and of the old empire which had been born in the city of Darre, far to the south where now the skopos reigned at the great Hearth of Our Lady. Except for the first three pages it was all written in her father’s hand or, toward the end, in her own, a long and rather confused compilation of the knowledge gleaned over the years by a mathematicus, thrown together as though Da had copied every reference he could remember or find in whatever library had been at hand during his travels. Although she had not memorized the entire florilegia, scraps of it emerged, quotations like fish swimming to the surface.

  “Astronomy concerns itself with the revolutions of the heavens, the rising and setting of the constellations, their movements and names, the motions of the stars and planets, Sun and Moon, and the laws governing these motions and all their variations. …

  “The mathematici seek the secrets of the heavens even beyond these laws, for such movements invoke the powers and such powers can be used for sorcery. …

  “So also the sea wonderfully agrees with the Moon’s circuit. They are always companions in growing and waning. …

  “If in the month of Novarian you ring the bell for Vigils when you see Arktos rise, then thirty psalms may be sung without difficulty….

  “Do not shave when the Moon is in the sign of the Falcon. …

  “In this manner, when Aturna and Erekes are in opposition, the daimones of the seventh sphere may be drawn down through the second sphere and if the Moon is full her influence will pull them into the bonds of your invocation. …”

  The third book was written in the infidel way—on paper—and in the infidel’s language, its curling loops and swirls like fanciful bird tracks. This was the great Jinna astronomical tract, On the Configuration of the World, written by the infidel scholar al-Hasan ibn al-Haithan al-Tulaytilah. This copy came from the great scholar’s own scribes, for they had met him when they resided for over two years at the court of the Kalif of Qurtubah in the infidel kingdom of Andalla.

  The oldest and most frail of the books, written on yellowed and brittle papyrus, was bound into the middle. The hand that had painstakingly written out each word and page had done so in an alphabet she did not know, but the ancient text was glossed with notes in Arethousan. Its contents remained a mystery, for Da could not read the old text either, and though he knew Arethousan, there was simply no time to teach her a new and difficult language. What time they did have for learning he used to hone the skills she had: her memory city, her knowledge of the stars, her understanding of Wendish and Dariyan and Jinna. According to Da, she had spoken Salian and Aostan as a child, but she had long since forgotten them.

  “Better to know three languages well than half a dozen badly,” he would say to her.

  The bird whistled again. Nothing moved except wind through the branches. She took in a breath for courage and walked across the clearing to kneel beside the old oak. Low, among roots bursting up through the ground, a little den lay, half filled in with leaves and debris. She worked quickly with the trowel, digging it out.

  A branch snapped behind her. Birds shrieked, wings beating as they lifted out of the trees toward the safety of the sky. Silence fell. She started up, but it was too late.

  Fool, and a greater fool yet. There stood Hugh at the clearing’s edge, smiling. He walked forward slowly, savoring his victory. Liath planted her feet on either side of the gaping hole, even raised the trowel in useless protection. But what good would a garden trowel do against a man trained at arms and carrying a sword?

  “Dig it out,” he said, halting before her. He was too fine a man to get his hands dirty or to sully the hem of his fine azure tunic—where had his frater’s robe gone?—by kneeling in the dirt.

  She threw the trowel down. “No. Do it yourself.”

  He hit her so hard backhanded that she fell stunned to the ground. She could not make her hands move, or her legs, but she heard the soft noise the trowel made, stabbing into the dirt and debris and spilling it to one side, a shower of earth, like water.

  Hugh gave a satisfied grunt. “There,” he murmured.

  She pulled in a deep breath, sucking in a cloud of fine dirt, and choked, coughing. But she could move again
. She could not let him get the book. It was all that was left to her. She shoved herself up, trembling, only to see Hugh shake out an empty roll of cloth.

  He stared. Streaked with dirt and damp from earth and leaves, the cloth stirred sluggishly in the breeze. Horrified, she scrambled forward on her hands and knees and dug frantically into the den. But the den was empty.

  “It’s gone!” She slumped forward and leaned her head against the oak. Gone. Some animal had rooted it out and torn it to bits. A child, digging for eggs, had found it and taken it home for fuel for the fire. Ai, Lady and Lord! Such a precious thing, to be lost so stupidly. If she had only thought of a better place to hide it, but she had only had one brief chance, begging Hanna before she was dragged off by Marshal Liudolf to her jail; the old oak was their favorite meeting place. What if Hanna had not hidden the book at all, but had only said she had? What if Hanna had taken it for herself—?

  But this was Hugh’s influence. If she could not trust Hanna, then nothing and no one, ever again.

  “Damn you,” said Hugh. “A pretty charade. But I’ll have the book, Liath. I am more patient than you can imagine.”

  She ducked her head, waiting for the blow, but it never came. She heard his footsteps and turned to see him walking away. He vanished into the forest. A moment later she caught a glimpse of his mare; the sound of their passage through the undergrowth receded into the afternoon.

  She began to cry, then squeezed her eyes shut. She would not give in to despair. All summer she had held out. If she gave in now, she might as well give herself entirely to Hugh.

  “Never that,” she said in a low voice. She wiped hard at her eyes to let the pain still the tears and, finally, went back to the chapel. First, she must talk to Hanna. As Da always said: “Take one step at a time so you may know where to place the next one.”