Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (72 page)

"Bless you, Brother."

"Nay," he said impatiently. "I was of no use. Princess Theophanu remained calm throughout the disaster, but it is only because of Captain Fulk and his men that we escaped with our lives. They did not let the passing days lull them into somnolence, as the rest of us did. Ironhead's men are merciless. It is clear to me now that they had long planned to attack our encampment without warning. Indeed, we are lucky that Queen Adelheid chose to lead her escape when she did, or we would all of us have been lost, because I do believe Ironhead had made plans to wipe us out entirely. Only because of the queen's gambit was he forced to pull many of his forces back to the city. He had already placed men beyond our lines in readiness for a night attack."

Abruptly, above the ringing of harness and the steady clip-clop of horses and the whine of wind through the rocks, they heard the unmistakable clamor of battle joined.

"What is happening?" Rosvita exclaimed.

"Captain Rikard stayed behind with half of his men to ambush Ironhead and perhaps kill him, if God should favor them. That will buy us time."

"At the cost of their lives."

Fortunatus merely shrugged. They pressed on and soon the sounds of battle faded. Rosvita's awareness contracted to the agonizing throb in her back and the presence of Brother Fortunatus at her side. She stopped seeing the landscape through which they rode. She did not dismount when they came to a spring but gratefully drank the water brought to her by a Wendish soldier in his upturned helmet. The water was warm and the helmet slick with sweat, but she minded neither of these things: it was moist and it gave relief to her dry throat. She was past caring about anything else.

War was a sport for the young. Or was it sport at all, but only the physical manifestation of discontented ambition and youthful boredom? Old women rarely had the energy or the compulsion to ride to war: that was why God had placed them in positions of authority, to rein back the dangerously high spirits of those ruled by lust for material power and wealth, all that which is made of flesh and earth and thus tainted by the hand of the Enemy.

For a long while, as the sun rose higher in the sky, she simply shut her eyes and hung on, accompanied only by the sound of their passage through a ringing, empty countryside. It was hot for autumn. She thought perhaps her throat had become so parched that she would never talk again, but that surely would then allow her to retire from court and, at last, to finish her
History
of the Wendish people which she had promised to Queen Mathilda so long ago. Was it really five years ago she had made that promise? Had she been so occupied in Henry's court that she had accomplished so little? Would she ever finish?

"Sister!" She started, gasped at the pain, and became aware that she had dozed off in the saddle. Brother Fortunatus stood beside her, propping her up. "Are you fainting, Sister? Can you walk?"

A soldier stood beside her holding a hunk of dry bread and that same helmet. She had to soak the bread in the water to make it edible, but in the end she got it down and was able to look about, counting their much reduced company: Queen Adelheid, Princess Theophanu, some three dozen Wendish soldiers commanded by Captain Fulk, an equal number of Aostan soldiers, and an assortment of noble companions and clerics and servants numbering about three dozen. Slowly, she became aware of consternation eddying through the ranks. It took her a moment to understand its origin: in the last hour, eight horses, including the queen's, had come up lame, and they now did not have enough mounts. Two scouts had been sent back down the path to seek news of their pursuers, but neither had returned. They still had oats for the horses but no more food, and for water they were now entirely dependent on such springs and rivulets as they could find.

The bread had given her a bit of strength, and she now saw how cruel the countryside looked, a reddish, crumbling stone warped by wind and time to make great pillars worn smooth into striations as even as if God's Hand had painted them there and soft cliffs eroded with a hundred tiny cavelets along their faces. There were no trees. Grass and scrubby bushes huddled like lost souls along dry streambeds.

"No!" Adelheid's voice rang out. She looked as bold as a lioness. "I have lost too much now to give in to Ironhead. He has made it a duel between him and me, and I refuse to surrender or to give up! A short way from here we will leave this path and turn north into the wilderness of Capardia."

"He will see our tracks," objected Theophanu, without heat. Rosvita had to admire her. As dusty as they all were, as exhausted, as bereft of hope, Theophanu remained composed and upright, coolly assessing their desperate situation.

"So he will," replied Adelheid. "But where we will go, it will make no matter because he cannot follow us. Who among you is brave enough to follow me into the haunts of those long dead?"

A sentry waved a flag from the ridge behind them, and word was ferried down from man to man until it reached Adelheid. "He sees Berto riding in our direction, at a gallop."

"Then one of our scouts returns to us," said Adelheid with satisfaction.

But suddenly, the sentry left his post and came scrambling down the hill himself at a run, men scattering around him. "Ai, Your Majesty!" he cried. "Berto's shot in the back by an arrow. I see Ironhead's banner, and his men. We haven't much time."

"And how much time do we have?" asked Theophanu as calmly as if she were asking for a second helping of meat at supper.

"They'll be on us within an hour like to that sung by the clerics at sunrise."

They looked then, all of them, to Adelheid, not toward Theophanu.

"Come," she said decisively. "Brother Amicus knows this country well, for he was fostered here. He will lead us to the convent of St. Ekatarina. There my mother sent me when I was a child and my elder sister had just been abducted and killed by a prince not unlike Ironhead. I lived there in safety for a year while war killed my three older brothers. The nuns won't turn me away. Come, then! We must hurry!"

Several of them were forced to double up in the saddle, including Rosvita. As they rode in haste along the path, Rosvita sat behind Fortunatus and simply laid her head against his broad back, bonier now, but still substantial. She drifted off; started into wakefulness when they left the main path and headed up into a landscape so weird that for a hallucinatory while she thought they had passed through a magical portal into another world entirely, inhabited by fantastical creatures from another plane of existence: basilisks and dragons, griffins and giants molded from stones. Eight riders remained behind to brush away the mark of their passing and to go on along the main path as a decoy. Brave men, each one. But wasn't that the way of the soldier? If he served his lady faithfully, he would be rewarded with earthly prosperity if he lived, and when he died, as all must in time, then with a place among the loyal retainers in the Chamber of Light.

She was dizzy with hunger and pain, and everything seemed so strange to her. Her lips burned as with words unspoken.

"What was the Great Sundering?" she asked. But no one answered, and she closed her eyes to blessed darkness.

A long time later she swayed as on the ocean, and the gulf of air opened beyond her so that if she inhaled deeply enough, she could breathe in the entire universe and all the stars which lay within reach of her hand, there beyond the chasm: She saw ground far below and a cliff at her shoulder, rubbed by the huge basket in which she sat all curled up. She was jerked upward, fainted again, and then there was rock beneath her feet and hands to lift her up. Many voices echoed around her, and it was terribly dark, as dark as the Abyss, into which none of God's light shines, for it is not the presence of the Enemy that is torment as much as the absence of God.

But the air was sweet, and she was laid down on a soft bed and water soothed her skin and then an ointment eased the terrible pain that had gripped her back and shoulders and she was fed a gruel so soft and mildly warm that it slipped down her throat like a salve for the dolorous heart.

But no one had yet answered her. A face swam into view, as blurry as a shifting shoal of minnows underwater. It was an

cient, wrinkled like an apple left over from the last autumn's harvest.

"What was the Great Sundering?" Rosvita asked, surprised to hear her own voice, such as it was, coarsened by pain and the hardship of the journey and their failure. Why was she asking this question? Where had it come from?

The ancient crone smoothed a salve onto her cheeks. For a moment it stung, then faded. "You are suffering from a lack of water, and a surfeit of sun and pain and anxiety, my child," she said in a voice made reedy by age. "Who has spoken to you of the Great Sundering?"

"I don't know," said Rosvita, marveling. Her eyes had adjusted. Two slits in the rock chamber let in air and light, and she realized that she lay on a pallet in the middle of a circular room hewn from rock. The plastered walls were entirely covered with frescoes that had long since cracked and peeled with immense age. People—nay, not people, but creatures like to humankind—stared at her with jade green eyes and skin now discolored to a greenish bronze. They wore plumage more than clothing, bold feathers, crudely cut skirts sewn of leather and furs, cunningly tied loincloths, shawls woven of shells and gold beads and precious stones. There was some narrative written into these paintings, a lush land torn by invasion, a desperate, overwhelmed population, the workings of magi each of whom held a staff carved out of black stone. A man of their kind was flayed alive, and his blood gave birth to warriors. Great cities of a vast and intricate architecture burned and toppled. And there was a crown of stars: a stone circle set out under a night sky brilliant with stars. Only one constellation was picked out in jewels above the stone circle, that of the Child who will be Queen; she reached for the sparkling cluster of seven stars, itself called the Crown, that lay directly above Rosvita at the height of the curved dome that was the ceiling of the stone chamber.

"Where am I?" Rosvita whispered.

"We are here in the convent of St. Ekatarina, she who prayed and fasted in the desert for many days until in the heavens she saw a vision of titanic battles and of dragons flying in the sky. And a voice said to her: 'All that is lost will be reborn on this earth because of a Great Unveiling like to that Great Sundering in which vanished the Aoi.' Then she came to this place. Here she found these paintings which spoke to her of that terrible time when the Lost Ones ruled mortal lands. Here she established a convent, and so we few have followed after her in caring for what God have preserved."

"Are these relics of the Aoi themselves?"

"Who can know, child? These were painted long ago. Perhaps they represent the last testament of the Aoi. Perhaps they represent the memories of those humans who lived in that long ago time, before they had the means to record their remembrances in writing. But you must rest now. You must sleep."

"The others?"

"They are safe."

She left, and Rosvita was alone, yet not alone at all because of the creatures who stared at her from the walls, accusing, plaintive, proud, and angry.
They are not like us.
They looked hard and cruel, arrogant and cunning and unforgiving. What was it the church mothers had written of elvenkind?
"Bom of the mating between humans and angels."
With all the cold beauty of angels and the bestial passions of humankind.

Sanglant's mother had looked so. Rosvita had seen her one time, when she was herself a very young woman newly come to King Arnulf's court. The elven woman had called herself. "Alia," which means "other," in Dariyan; no one had ever known her real name. She had wanted something, and everyone had first thought she wanted the child, but then she had abandoned him soon after his birth.

What had Alia truly wanted? Would they ever know?

Beyond the fresco depicting the stone circle and an assembly of Aoi magicians, a painted obsidian knife seemed to cut away the narrative told on these walls, as if to end it. Beyond the knife-cut lay only a scene of sharp sea cliffs and shoreline and the cool expanse of empty sea. All the elves, and their cities, and their troubles, and their enemies, had vanished.

LIATH didn't like being pregnant. It made her feel stupid, and ungainly, and trapped in an odd way that she had never before experienced, as if before she could have stepped off the earth into the aether without looking back and now she was anchored to the earth by the creature growing inside her. It also made her tired, and cranky, and weepy, and distracted. Her feet hurt. And she had to pee all the time.

But except for that, she was utterly and enchantingly happy. Right now, with a contented sigh, she sank down to sit on the edge of the bed. It had, of course, been the first thing Sanglant had helped Heribert build when they arrived at Verna four months ago. Sanglant tumbled into bed behind her and stretched out with one hand propping up his head and the other splayed over her belly, feeling the beat, so he always said, of their child's heart.