PROLOGUE (14 page)

Ermanrich touched a hand to his elbow, though novices were not supposed to touch, to form bonds of affection and sympathy. They were meant to devote themselves only to God. "You're thinking of
her
again," said the stout boy. "Was she really as pretty as Baldwin?"

"Utterly unlike," said Ivar, but then he smiled, because Ermanrich always made him smile. "She was dark
—"

"Dark like Duke Conrad the Black?" asked Baldwin without looking up from his scraping at the fence. "I met him once."

"Met
him?" demanded Ermanrich.

"Oh, well, not met. I saw him once."

"I don't know if they look anything alike," said Ivar. "I never saw Duke Conrad. How did he get to be so dark?"

"His mother came from the east. She was a princess from Jinna country." Baldwin had a treasure trove of gossip about the noble families of Wendar and Varre. "She was a present to one of the Arnulfs, I forget which, from one of the sultans of the east. Conrad the Elder, who was then Duke of Wayland, took a fancy to her and because King Arnulf owed him a favor, he asked for the girl. She was just a child then, but very pretty, everyone said. Conrad had her raised as a good Daisanite, for she came of heathen fire-worshipers. When she was old enough, he took her as a concubine, but of all his wives and concubines only
she
conceived by him, so perhaps she knew some eastern witchery, for the rumor went round that Conrad was infertile because of a curse set on him by one of the Lost Ones he raped when he was a young man."

Ermanrich coughed again and cocked one eyebrow up.

"You don't believe me?" demanded Baldwin, cheek ticking as he tried to suppress a grin.

"Which part do you wish to know that I believe?" asked Ermanrich.

"And then what happened?" asked Ivar, trying to imagine this Jinna girl but only able to see Liath in his mind's eye. The thought of her made his heart ache.

"She gave birth to a baby boy, the second Conrad, whom we now know as Conrad the Black. He succeeded to the duchy when his father died. She still lives, you know, the Jinna woman. I don't know what her old name was, her heathen name, but she was baptized with a good Daisanite name, Mariya or Miryam. Something like that."

"They let a bastard inherit?" asked Ermanrich, looking skeptical.

"No, no. At the end of his life, when it came time to name his heir, Conrad the Elder claimed he had been married to her all along. The first tame deacon he got to say she was present at the ceremony then turned out to have been only ten years old when the marriage was supposed to have been solemnized. So Conrad finally made a huge bequest of land to the local biscop and
she
agreed that God had sanctified the union before the child's birth. Look! I've made a crack!" He leaned down and stuck his perfectly-proportioned nose up against the wood, closed one eye, and peered through the tiny gap with the other. Then he withdrew, shaking his head. "All I can see is warts. I
knew
they would have warts."

"Dearest Baldwin, doomed by warts to a life in the monastery," said Ermanrich in a sententious voice. "Now move and let me try." They changed places.

"Hush," said Ivar. "Here comes Lord Reginar and his dogs."

Lord Reginar had a pack of five "dogs"
—the other second-year novices—and a thin face made ill-featured mostly because of its habitual sour expression.

"What's this?" he said, pausing beside the three first-year boys. He touched a scrap of very fine white linen to his lips as if the stench of the first years offended him. "Are you at your daily
prayers?"
That he meant to insinuate something was clear, though what exactly he meant was not.

Ivar stifled a giggle. He found Reginar's conceit so pathetic, especially compared to that of Hugh, that he always wanted to laugh. But a count's son never ever laughed at the son of a duchess and one who, in addition, wore the gold torque around his neck that symbolized he came of the blood of the royal family and had a claim
—however distant—to the throne.

Ermanrich clasped his hands tight and leaned against the fence, covering the telltale signs of cutting. He began to murmur a psalm in the singsong voice he used at his prayers.

Baldwin smiled brightly up at the young lord. "How kind of you to deign to notice us this day, Lord Reginar," he said without any obvious sign of sarcasm.

Ermanrich made a choking sound.

Reginar touched his lips again with the linen, but even he
—youngest son of Duchess Rotrudis and nephew of both Mother Scholastica and King Henry—was not immune to Baldwin's charms. "It is true," he said, "that two marchlanders and a minor count's son are unlikely to receive attentions from such as myself every day, but then you are entitled to sleep near me, as are all these others." He gestured toward his sycophants, an indistinguishable collection of boys of good family who had had the misfortune to be dedicated to the monastery last year, together with Reginar, and had by necessity—or by force—fallen into orbit around him.

"Pray you," said Baldwin sweetly, "do not forget our good comrade Sigfrid, Mother Scholastica's favorite. I am sure he, too, is not insensible to the favor you show us."

Ermanrich fell into a fit of frantic coughing. One of the boys hovering at Reginar's back tittered, and the young lord turned right around and slapped him hard. Then he spun and stalked away, his "dogs" scurrying after him.

Fittingly, at that moment Sigfrid came running out of the dormitory, his sharp face alight, his novice's robes all askew. He did not notice Reginar. He never did. And that was the worst insult of all, although Reginar never understood that Sigfrid noticed nothing except his studies, his prayers, and
—now—his three friends.

"I heard the most amazing news," Sigfrid said as he halted beside them. He knelt with the practiced ease of a person who has spent years moving into or out of a kneeling position, as indeed Sigfrid himself cheerfully admitted he had, having come at age five to his vocation: monk-in-training.

"That was cruel," said Ermanrich.

"What was?" asked Sigfrid.

Baldwin smiled. "Poor Reginar. He can't abide that his own dear aunt, Mother Scholastica, favors a mere steward's son and lavishes her favor
—and her private tutorials—on that lowborn creature instead of on her nephew."

"Oh, dear," said Sigfrid. He looked concerned all at once. "I do not mean to make anyone envious of me. I have not striven for Mother Scholastica's attention, and yet
—" His face took on an expression of rapt contempla
‍
Doos tion. "
—to be privileged to study with her and with Brother
Methodius
—"

"You know what they say." Baldwin cut in before Sigfrid could launch into a long recitation
—by heart, of course— of whatever horrific matristic text written centuries ago he had studied today in Mother Scholastica's study. "Why, no," said Ermanrich. "What do they say?" "That Lord Reginar was put into the monastery only because his mother detests him. Had she allowed him to become ordained as a frater and then be elevated to the rank of presbyter, he would have had to visit her every three years as is traditional, as long as she lives, and she decided it was better to put him in the monastery where she'd never have to see him again if she didn't wish it."

Ermanrich snorted, gulped, and began to laugh helplessly.

Sigfrid gazed sorrowfully at Baldwin and only shook his head, as if to remind the other boy that the Lord and Lady looked ill on those who spoke spitefully of others. "I believe it," muttered Ivar.

"I'm sorry, Ivar," said Baldwin quickly. "I didn't mean to remind you of your own situation."

"Never mind," said Ivar. "What's done is done. What was your news, Sigfrid?"

"King Henry's progress is coming here, to Quedlinhame, for the Feast of St. Valentinus. They expect the king today or tomorrow!"

"How do you know this?" Ermanrich demanded. "Not even Hathumod knows, for if she did, she'd have told me." Sigfrid blushed. He had a sensitive face, his expressions made interesting by the conflict between his studious nature and solitary soul on the one hand and the very real and passionate liking he had taken to his year-mates on the other. "Alas, I fear I overheard them. It was ill-done of me, I know
—but I couldn't wait to tell you, for I knew you would want to hear! Imagine! The king!"

Baldwin yawned. "Ah, yes. I've met the king."

"Have you really
met
him?" demanded Ermanrich, laughing.

The schoolmaster appeared under the colonnade and they all leaped guiltily to their feet and with contrite faces made their way to the line. As first years, they took their place at the end, matched up in pairs. Before them walked Reginar and his sycophants, and in front of Reginar
—although Reginar hated
anyone
to walk in front of him— stood the humble third years.

As they marched out of the dormitory and made their way along the path that led to the church, Ivar craned his neck when the brown-robed female novices came into view. For his pains he got a sharp whack on his shoulders from the schoolmaster's willow switch. It stung, but in a way the pain helped him. The pain helped him remember that he was Ivar, son of Count Harl and Lady Herlinda. He was not truly a monk, not by vocation as Sigfrid was, nor was he resigned to his fate as was Ermanrich, sixth of seven sons of a marchland countess who, to her horror, had never given birth to a girl and had perforce made her eldest son her heir and after that hastily dedicated the superfluous boys to the church so they would not contest their brother's elevation to the rank of count after her death. Unlike Baldwin, he had not escaped an unwanted marriage by begging to be put in the church.

No. He had been forced to take the novice's hood. Forced because he loved Liath and she loved him and he would have taken her away from Hugh, and this had been Hugh's way of revenging himself on Ivar.

No. He never minded the pain or the austerities of a novice's life. The pain, even of the willow switch, reminded Ivar daily that he would, somehow, avenge himself on Hugh and save Liath from Hugh's clutches. No matter that Hugh
—bastard though he was—ranked far above a minor count's youngest son. No matter that Hugh's mother, a powerful margrave, was an acknowledged favorite of King Henry.

By hating Quedlinhame, Ivar kept himself strong enough to hate Hugh. Somehow, some way, Ivar would have his revenge.

BLOODHEART had sons. As time passed, Sanglant learned how to recognize them: by their ornamentation. Only the sons of Bloodheart could stud their teeth with gems; the mail skirts they wore, as intricate as lace, were gilded with gold and silver and woven with bright stones and flashing jewels; a stylized red-ocher arrowhead, symbol of their father's hegemony, figured prominently in the pattern of colorful painting with which they decorated their torsos.

As summer passed into autumn and the vast nave of air in the cathedral grew steadily colder, sons came and went .from their favored place in front of Bloodheart's heavy chair. They left for expeditions whose fruit brought gold, cattle, slaves, and a harvest of endlessly fascinating small items: an eagle-feather quill, a length of sky-blue silk, a sword with an ornamented gold hilt, vases carved out of horn or marble, an arrow fletched with the iron-gray feathers of a griffin, a turquoise pendant engraved with six-pointed stars inlaid with gold, a silver paten, a bloodstone cameo ring, a linen tablecloth embroidered with silk, slivers of ossified dragon's fire sharpened into thin blades, a hoard of green beads, translucent angel's tears polished and strung together as a necklace, silk bed-curtains, and silk-covered pillows. Bloodheart tossed one of the pillows to Sanglant, but the dogs ripped it to pieces and bits of its feather stuffing floated, spinning in the still air, for the rest of the day.

One son haunted the cathedral more than the others, favored or in disgrace, Sanglant could not tell. He was easily distinguished from the others: He wore at his chest a wooden Circle of Unity, no doubt a trophy ripped off a corpse, and he had taken upon himself the odd habit of, once a day, overseeing the slave who brought bucket and rags to clean up the spot where, at the limit of his chains, Sanglant relieved himself. This humiliation Sanglant en
‍
dured in silence. It was, in its own way, a mercy not to be left to fester in worse filth than what he already had to suffer.

But Bloodheart was fickle, or perhaps it served his purposes to act so.

Day by day more Eika trickled in until their numbers swamped the cathedral. They were like a swarm of locusts, all of them pestering him with pricks of their spears, with spit, with dogs sent to fight him until the tunic he had wrapped his forearms in lay in shreds on the floor and his skin was a mass of bleeding scrapes and bites. But it would heal. It always did, cleanly and without infection. Some of the dogs died, to be eaten by his pack and, finally, by him as well; this food he could not scorn, because he had so little. The dogs that fled him were quickly killed by their pack brothers.