Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 1 (5 page)

Not knowing what else to do, he knelt. He did not let his gaze falter from hers; to blink might well prove fatal. "Lady." His voice was as hoarse as hers was resonant. He tried again. "I am sworn to the church."

"Not in your heart," she said. She drew her sword. Whatever he expected, no light flamed off the blade; it did not gleam or spark. It was dull metal, hard, good metal, made for killing. She swung it over his head in a high arc and pointed back the way she had come.

The air seemed sucked away from the height on which they stood. As down a long tunnel, seen with the sight of eagles, he saw the monastery, though he could not possibly see it from here. The orderly pattern of buildings, the retaining wall: Seen from so high, he thought for an instant he could discern a second pattern underlying the monastery buildings, something ancient and troubling.

But his view tumbled, down and down and down, until he saw two boats drawn up on the strand and the creatures pouring forth from them. They could not be called men, with their strange, sharp faces and inhuman
c
oloring. Naked to the waist, their torsos and faces were patterned with white scars and garish painted colors. They carried axes and spears and bows with stone-tipped arrows, and their skin bore a scaly, metallic sheen. Some had claws bursting from their knuckles, a horrible, white growth. Dogs ran with them, packs of huge, ugly dogs that had less mercy than their masters.

They burned as they went, setting fire to the thatched roofs of the outlying buildings. They slaughtered the monks without mercy. Somehow he could see inside the chapel. He could see Brother Gilles, where he knelt praying at the altar, silver-haired and frail, clutching his beloved gold-leafed
Book of Unities,
the treasure of the monastery. A white-haired barbarian stuck the old man through from behind and wrenched the precious book from his dying grasp, then ripped the gold, jewel-encrusted cover off the binding, tossing the parchment leaves like so much offal onto Brother Gilles' bloody corpse.

"You are not yet sworn by your own oath," said the woman. With a wrench Alain stood again on the ridge, hemmed in by storm.

"I must go!" he cried. He started up, impelled forward by some wild notion of saving Brother Gilles.

She stopped him with the flat of her sword. "It is too late for them. But see."

And pointed with her sword toward the village.

A haze of lights. Red streamers flapped damply against eaves. Most of the houses were well shut, except for Aunt Bel's. She stood huddled in the doorway, staring forlornly, with bitter concern, up the road in the direction he had gone. Behind her, Stancy played chess at the table with her youngest sister, little Agnes; she moved, white Dragon takes red Castle. The other children cast circle-sticks by the hearth, and the baby slept in its cradle. The fire blazed and cracked, hot, smoking.

Alain's eyes watered from it, such heat, and then he was yanked outside into the sharp cold and the stinging wind. On the strand below the village, a long, narrow
b
oat beached. Ai, Lord and Lady! There were more of them! They flooded out of the boat, clawed, painted, readying their weapons.

Fog boiled past his eyes. He swatted it away. Tears streaked his face. "It's too late." He turned to her where she sat as serene as death on her white horse. "Why are you showing me this?"

She smiled. She had a terrible beauty, seared by hardship and agony and the wild madness of battle. "Serve me," she said. "Serve me, Alain Henrisson, and I will spare the village."

"How can you?" he gasped, remembering Brother Gilles impaled, the monastery in flames, seeing the wild, savage creatures who charged up the strand toward the houses of his kin and neighbors.

"Serve me," she said.

Alain collapsed to his knees. Was that the baby's scream on the wind? "I swear it."

"Stand."

He stood. The cold steel of her sword came to rest on his right shoulder, then his left, then, last, achingly cold, so that it seemed to suck all heat from him and yet burn him at the same time, she rested the flat of the blade on his head.

"Who are you?" he whispered.

The sword, like pain by death, was lifted. Her reply rang out and yet was muted by the howl of the wind. "I am the Lady of Battles.-Keep this, my token."

And she was gone. A blinding light pierced his eyes, and pain stabbed through his heart. The dark clouds blew up and enveloped him. Far away, he heard a hoarse, gleeful battle cry, and then he fainted.

He woke suddenly. Sat up in fear. It was morning, St. Eusebe's Day, a bright, fine, clear spring dawning without a trace of cloud. A day of good omens. The bay ran in smooth ripples below. The rich old green of trees rimmed the blue bowl of the sky. He swore, shaking off his stupor, and stood up.

A
nd saw, on the path, a tiny blood-red rose. It glittered like a jewel, but when he reached to pick it up, its petals were as soft as the first flower of spring. He shifted his grip, and a thorn pricked his skin, drawing a welling bulb of blood.

"Aunt Bel," he murmured. "Stancy." The baby. He thrust the rose stem under his belt and ran all the way back to Osna.

A few people stared when he halted, gasping for breath, at the edge of the village common. Aunt Bel saw him, and her face went from white to red in one instant. She rushed across to him and pinned him in her arms.

"Alain! Oh, my child, I thought you were lost to us."

"You're all here? All well? Where is Stancy
—?"

"In the workshop. My poor lad, come in, come in." She led him unprotesting into the longhouse and sat him at the table, setting a mug of warm goat's milk in front of him. "Lord and Lady." She wiped a tear from her weathered face. "I was sure you must have been there. Lord and Lady, thank Them, thank Them." She drew the Circle of Unity, throat to heart and back again. "How did you escape? When old Gilles brought the news
—

He felt a surge of hope and relief. "Brother Gilles?"

"No, lad. Gilles Fisher. He never saw the ships, they came so fast, in with that cursed storm and gone again as quickly. The whole monastery they burned, and every monk they slaughtered where he stood. All dead. But somehow, Their blessings on us, we were spared. Never a sound or a sight of them here. We're all safe. I'm sure Henri is well south by now. They came from out of the north."

"I never got as far as the monastery," he whispered, but all he could see was that distant, unnatural sight of the painted men, burning, killing . . . beaching their ship on the strand below the village. He could not bring himself to speak of his vision, if vision it was.

"But I'm fair willing to believe," continued Aunt Bel in a low voice, "that it was the Lord and Lady's judgment on them in the monastery, for turning against her
a
s ought to be Queen Regnant. Still, no use speaking ill of the dead. Some of the village men have gone over to give them a decent burial."

"There's something I must see." Alain rose. Aunt Bel looked at him questioningly but he did not stay for questions, he was out the door so fast. He ran down to the strand where the fishers and merchants pulled up their boats, coming in to trade or shelter at Osna.

It took him a bit of a walk, down along the foot of the ridge, to find the long deep scar where the low-bellied ship had beached and been dragged up onto the sand. Where the tide had not obliterated them, some of the footsteps were still left, racing upward, and then stopping, milling about. There was even one thin stain of blood, coloring the dun sand, and a single shod hoofprint.

The morning stayed clear and fine as he climbed the ridge. From the dragon's back he could see no sign of ships at all on the flat opacity of the bay or on the farther blue-gray horizon of the sea. He walked farther yet and came to an overlook where he could stand off from the path, which now wound down away from the ridge into the forest, and see down from the height to the monastery far below. It lay in smoking ruins. A few vultures circled. To the north of the church tower a pit had been dug; he saw it from here as a dark mouth. Men moved, dragging bodies into the grave. He ran, now, but by the time he reached the remains of the monastery, Chatelaine Dhuoda's deacon was reading the mass for the dead over the grave as men from the village pitched dirt in to cover the bodies of the slain monks.

"You, boy," said Chatelaine Dhuoda, startling him. He had not seen her. "You are the boy who was to be sworn into the novitiate today, are you not? You're of good age? Sixteen? Yes, and you're a fit, tall lad, I see."

The way she looked him over made him feel like a horse or a slave from beyond the northern sea brought to the auction block.

"There's nothing for you here now, and Count Lavastine has need of many more strong arms, as you can see yourself. These are bad times. I'll speak with your aunt, but in any case, it is my right to mark you out for service to the count. You will come with us when we leave tomorrow."

He did not know what to say. Overjoyed for the chance to go, he feared that it was his own desire to be free of his duty to the monks that had brought death on them. But that, as his father would say, was pride of self, to think his selfish, trivial wishes could affect the world as God's will does. It was the godless barbarians who had brought death so cruelly; it was nothing to do with him.

Dhuoda regarded him impatiently, waiting for his reply. He nodded his head, and she turned away, dismissing him. Her fur-lined cloak swayed as she walked briskly toward the deacon, who had finished the hasty mass.

Alain's hand caught on his belt, and suddenly he remembered the rose. It was not crushed. It had not wilted. It was as perfect as a budding rose just plucked from the bush. He held it in his hand all the long walk back to Osna, and still it did not change.

In the morning, he carefully bound the rose to a thin leather string and hung it around his neck, tucked between shirt and tunic where no one could see. A thicker string held the wooden Circle of Unity Aunt Bel gave him to wear as a reminder of his father's promise to the church.

After bittersweet farewells, he slung his pack over his back and followed Chatelaine Dhuoda and her retinue out of the village, into the world beyond.

II
THE BOOK OF SECRETS IN the northernmost reaches of the North Mark of Wendar lay a cluster of hamlets and villages known as Heart's Rest. The people here spoke a peculiar dialect of Wendish flavored with odd words and unconventional pronunciations.

Traveling fraters noted with distress that an alarmingly pagan-looking Tree figured as prominently in the wood-frame churches of Our Lord and Lady as did the Circle of Unity. The biscop of Heart's Rest turned her gaze the other way, concerned more with the yearly increase in raids along the coast. But she did not prohibit the most punctilious of the fraters from sending reports south of this heathenish practice.

Nothing ever came of these reports. Heart's Rest was too far north, too sparsely populated, and by no means wealthy enough to attract the attention of either king or skopos. It was a quiet peninsula, set apart from Wendar proper. People spoke softly and kept to their own business.

They remained as tolerant toward the occasional outsider who washed up on their shores as their biscop remained to the lingering taint of pagan rites in the handful of churches under her watch.

Let well enough alone.
People said it often, and firmly. Those outsiders who came to rest there might find peace, for a while.

It depended, really, on who they were running from, and how far their enemies were willing to track them.

"See, there," said Da. "Setting below the trees in the west. The Rose Star, known by the ancient Babaharshan magicians as Zuhia, sun of the night, mage and scholar. What can you tell me about him?"

"The Dariyan astronomers called the Rose Star by the name Aturna, the Red Mage. It is a lesser light than the Blood Star but of a truer cast. Aturna is one of the traveling stars, also known as the erratica, or planets. It rules the seventh sphere, whose upper surface is tangent to the orb of the fixed stars beyond which lies the Chamber of Light. Its lower surface is tangent to the sixth sphere, that ruled by the planet Mok. Aturna takes twenty-eight years to travel along the path of the twelve Houses of Night."

They stood in the clearing, trees below, the rocky verge of the hill above. The grass, growing hard now that spring had come, reached their knees. Behind, on a level terrace of ground, the cottage sat dark but for a faint red glow, the hearth fire glimpsed through the open door and window. It was a perfect night for viewing: There was not a trace of cloud in the sky.

"Name the seven spheres and their order," said Da.

"The sphere closest to the Earth is that of the Moon. The second is that of the planet Erekes, and the third is that of the planet Somorhas, also known as the Lady of Light. Fourth is the sphere of the Sun. Then comes the fifth sphere, which is ruled by the planet Jedu, the Angel
o
f War. The sixth sphere is ruled by Mok, and the seventh
—and last—by Aturna. Beyond Aturna lies the field of stars each of which is a fire burning bright before the Chamber of Light."

"And the seven ladders known to the mages, by which the learned can ascend as if through the seven spheres to the place of wisdom and mastery?" He turned over the book he held in his hands but did not open it. Three partridges, shot by Liath, hung on a line from his shoulder. They had been out hunting and came back late, but since they always
—always—carried book and astrolabe with them, they could observe the heavens anywhere.