Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (62 page)

"Of course I do," said Baldwin reflexively, then muttered, "as long as you keep me away from Margrave Judith." Ivar kicked him, and he startled like a deer seeking cover. "I am grateful, my lord prince."

"As well you should be. Come, ride beside me, Baldwin."

A horse was brought. Ivar found a seat in one of the wagons, and there he brooded as he jolted along, listening to the chatter of the prince and his loyal retainers. He had heard the refrain often enough: That young men were reckless and feckless and untrustworthy by reason of lacking a steadying womb and the knowledge that they would give life to daughters, who would inherit after them. It was no wonder that women, like the Lady before them, held the reins of administration while they tended the Hearth. What could they expect from feckless men? Headstrong Prince Ekkehard? Pretty, spoiled Baldwin?

Was Ivar, son of Harl and Herlinda, any better? Trapped by desire for a woman who had never even wanted him. A coward, unlike Sigfrid, who however stupidly and disrespectfully had at least shouted the truth out loud, no matter the cost to himself.

He wept, although the day was bright.

"WHITE-HAIR! Snow woman!"

A dozen Ungrian warriors sat cross-legged on the ground, sharpening their curved swords, but they had all paused to look up as Hanna passed. She had almost grown used to being the center of attention whenever she walked through camp, on account of her blonde hair and light skin. Except for Prince Bayan, the Ungrians knew no Wendish, but it seemed like every soldier in his retinue had all learned these few phrases, and they were completely unashamed when it came time to call them out to her in their atrocious accents.

"Beautiful ice maiden, I die for you!" cried one young man with black hair and a long, drooping and exceptionally greasy mustache. He had sweet eyes, and was missing one of his front teeth. Like all the other Ungrians, he wore a padded leather coat over baggy trousers.

"My greetings to your wife, my friend," she called back in Ungrian. They all laughed, slapped their thighs, and began to talk volubly among themselves—probably about her. It was disconcerting, and tiring, being the object of so much attention.

Beside her, Brother Breschius chuckled. "Softer on the 'gh,'" he corrected, "but otherwise it was a creditable attempt. You have a better head for languages than your mistress."

Hanna let this gentle criticism pass unremarked. "They flirt terribly, Brother, but not one has propositioned me. I feel perfectly safe walking about the camp."

He grunted amiably. "For now you are safe. When they swear an oath, they keep it, and they are still barbarians in their hearts, which means they are superstitious. They truly do believe that if they waste their strength on carnal play before a battle, they will surely die at the hand of a man who did not
waste
himself in such a manner."

"But some who hold to that vow will die anyway."

"True. Such is God's will. In their minds, such deaths will be blamed on other things they did or did not do: stepping on a shadow, the chastity of their wife a hundred leagues away, a fly that landed on their left ear instead of their right. They profess to worship God in Unity, but they have not yet given their hearts fully into God's care. You, too, come from a land only recently brought into the Light, I believe, my child. On the first day of spring do you place flowers at a crossroads to bring you luck in your journeys for the rest of the year?"

She looked at him sharply. Then she grinned, because she liked him, with his missing hand and his tolerant heart. "You have traveled widely, Brother. You know a great deal."

He chuckled. "We are all ignorant. I do what I can to share God's Holy Word with those who live in night. But mind you, Eagle, be cautious after the battle. It is the custom of those who survive to behave wildly. At that time I advise you to remain close to your mistress."

She glanced up at their destination: a stone tower set on a ridge overlooking the long valley of the Vitadi River. Half a palisade of wood had been built a generation ago and then abandoned. Now, at Princess Sapientia's order, a levy of men from the surrounding settlements labored to complete the fort.

Men dug out a trench, hauled logs, swore, and sweated as she and Breschius climbed the path that led to the palisade gate and then inside, up a trail hacked into the rock face of a cliff, through a roughly-hewn tunnel where she had to duck her head, and into the fortress itself.

Within the inner rock wall she heard Prince Bayan's jovial laugh echoing among the stones. He stood at the threshold of the tower, laughing with the Wendish captain who commanded the fortress. Turning, he saw Hanna and beckoned her forward.

"The snow woman arrives!" he exclaimed. "Soon winter comes in her trail." He had a pleasant habit of wrinkling up his eyes when he spoke, and even when he didn't smile, his eyes laughed. Life was good to Prince Bay an because he made it so. "To where is my royal wife?" he asked.

Hanna glanced toward Brother Breschius who, mercifully, saved her the awkward reply. Lady Udalfreda of Naumannsfurt had arrived with twenty cavalry and thirty-five foot soldiers, and Princess Sapientia felt obliged to entertain her fittingly.

In truth, Hanna suspected Sapientia, for all her love of fighting, did not have the stomach for what she had sent Hanna to witness in her stead.

Bayan merely shrugged good-naturedly. The Wendish captain led the way down a narrow flight of stairs to the root cellar. It was very cold down here. Water dripped along the rough-hewn rock and made puddles for unwary boots. Beside the cellar door a brazier glowed red with coals; a soldier thrust an iron rod in among the coals to heat it. In the dankest corner, lit only by a dim lantern, lay a savage so heavily chained, wrists to ankles, that he had been forced to lie in his own filth. He stank. Two soldiers grabbed him by the shoulders as Bayan entered the room and jerked him upright. He only stared at them with stubborn eyes dulled by pain. A weeping sore marked his cheek. When he saw Bayan, he spat at him, but he could make no fluid pass his lips.

"This is the one we captured when they raided here two days ago," said the captain. "We burned him with an iron rod, but he would only speak in his language, and none of us understood him."

Jovial Prince Bayan had vanished somewhere on those stairs. The man who stared down at the Quman prisoner frightened Hanna because of his merciless expression. He dispensed with his crude Wendish and spoke directly to Breschius, who translated. "Bring me a block of wood and an ax." When that was done, he had them unchain the prisoner's left hand and haul the man forward. The prisoner had no weapons, of course, but he still wore his armor, which resembled nothing Hanna had ever seen before: small pieces of leather sewn together to make a hard coat of armor, and a leather belt studded with gold plackets formed in the shapes of horses and griffins. A small object swung from the belt, resting now on his bent legs, but she couldn't make it out. He wore a strange harness on his back, a contraption of wood and iron and, strangely enough, a few shredded feathers.

Hanna was beginning to feel sick to her stomach. Waves of stench accompanied the prisoner. He made no sound as the Wendish soldiers held his left hand, fingers splayed, against the block of wood. Prince Bayan drew his knife and with one sharp hack cut off the man's little finger.

A sound escaped the prisoner, a "gawh" of pain caught in as blood flowed. Bayan addressed him in a language Harma-diChhot recognize, but the man merely spat again in answer. Bayan cut off the next finger, and the next, and then Hanna had to look away. She thought maybe she was going to vomit. Bayan questioned the prisoner in a calm voice that did not betray in its tone the torment he was inflicting; she hung on to that voice, it was her lifeline. The man screamed.

She looked up to see him lolling back, handless now as blood pumped from the stump of his wrist. Thrown back as he was, she could see clearly the object that hung from his belt: black and wizened, headlike in shape with a dark mane of straw hanging from it, it had one side molded into the grotesque likeness of a face. Then the hot iron rod was brought forward to sear the wound, and as he screamed, she stared and stared at that ghastly little thing hanging from his belt so that she wouldn't have to watch his agony and after forever she realized that it was, in fact, a hideous little human head, all shrunken and nasty, with a glorious mane of stiff, black hair.

"I'm going to be sick," she muttered. Brother Breschius moved aside just in time and she threw up in the corner while, apparently oblivious to her, Prince Bayan got back to work on the right hand. He broke the fingers first, one by one, then cut off the little finger, then the next, then the middle finger; but the prisoner only grunted, stoic to the end.

Bayan finally cursed genially and slit the man's throat, stepping back nimbly so that he wouldn't get any blood on him.

"Once sword hand crippled, he never speak because he have nothing to go back to in his tribe, because he no longer a man," he explained. He shrugged. "So God wills. These Quman never talk anyway. Stubborn bastards." Then he laughed, an amazingly resonant and perverse sound in the stinking cellar. "That a good word, yes? Taught to me by Prince Sanglant.
'Stubborn-bastards. '
"

He chuckled and wiped at his eyes. He did not even give the corpse a second glance. It meant as little to him as a dead dog lying at the side of a road. "Come," he said to Hanna. "The snow woman must wash away this smell and be clean like the lily flower again, yes? We go to the feast."

They went to the feast, where Bay an entertained Lady Udalfreda and her noble companions with charming and somewhat indecent tales of his adventures as a very young man among the Sazdakh warrior women who, he claimed, could not count themselves as women or warriors until they had captured and bedded a young virgin and then cut off his penis as a trophy. Hanna couldn't touch a bite, although Brother Breschius kindly made sure that she drank a little wine to settle her stomach.

In a way, she was relieved when two scouts came in all dust-blown and wild-eyed with a report of a Quman army headed their way.

The Ungrian warriors slept, ate, and entertained in their armor. They were mounted and ready to ride so quickly that they made the good Wendish soldiers in Sapientia's train look like rank, newcomers, awkward and fumbling. Even the colorfully painted wagon of Bayan's mother rolled into line and waited there like a silent complaint long before Princess Sapientia finished arming, and mounted.

"Prince Bayan's mother will ride with us?" demanded Hanna Breschius nodded toward the wagon, his gaze alert. With its closed shutters and curtained door, it resembled a little house on wheels, and it would have looked rather quaint except for the clean white bones hanging from the eaves like charms, although they were, mercifully, not human but animal bones. At the peak of the roof a small wheel decorated with ribbons turned in the wind, fluttering red and yellow and white and blue as it spun. "The shamans of the Kerayit tribe do not carry their luck in their bodies as the rest of us do. Their luck is born into another person, someone born on the same day at the same time. It is said that Bayan's mother's luck was born into the child who later became Bayan's father, a prince of the Ungrian people, which is the only reason she agreed to marry him. But he died on the day Prince Bay an was born, so by their way of thinking her luck passed from father into son. That's why she must stay close by Prince Bayan, to watch over him." He smiled as if laughing at himself. "But she is in no real danger. Not even the Quman would harm a Kerayit princess, for they know what fate awaits the clan of he who touches a Kerayit shaman without her consent. You will see. She is useful."

They rode out at last, and Hanna was grateful to leave the stone tower behind. The chill autumn air and the dense odor of grass and brittle scrub brush drove the last vestiges of that terrible stink out of her nostrils. But an image of the hideous shrunken head seemed to ride with her, burned into her mind's eye.

They forded the river, running low here after summer's heat and autumn drought. The cold water on her calves made her breath come in gasps. Sapientia rode just ahead of—hefTteside Bayan, and the princess laughed merrily as they came splashing up the shoreline, more like a noble lady riding to the hunt than to a battle. Behind, the oxen drawing the wagon forged stolidly into the water, led forward by two of the handsome male slaves. And it was very strange, and most certainly a trick of the light running over the water, because it seemed to Hanna that the river receded somewhat, that the waves made of themselves a slight depression around the wheels of the wagon so that no water lapped into the bed. Behind the wagon marched the Wendish infantry; without horses, they were soaked to the hips, joking and laughing at those among them who showed any sign of sensitivity to the cold.

Soon everyone had crossed, and their army—perhaps two hundred soldiers in all—made ready to move on. Hills rose from the valley floor about half a league north of them. They turned east to follow the river. Clouds moved in from the east as the wind picked up. The Wendish soldiers began singing a robust hymn.