In the Ruins (31 page)

They waited for hours and hours at the river gate although, in truth, it wasn’t longer than it would take to sing the morning mass. The gurgle of the river serenaded them. The wind brought the smell of refuse. It was otherwise silent and dark. He could barely distinguish the walls of Autun behind him where he stood huddling at their base on the broad strand between gate and river’s edge. A score of boats had been drawn up onto the shore. The wharves were farther downstream, by the northern gate. A rat scuttled into the wavering, smoky light given off by the taper,
froze, and vanished when Erkanwulf threw a knife at it. The blade stuck in the ground, and he leaned down to pull it free.

“Where are the others?” Ivar asked.

“Most of them will remain behind to join the force that hunts for us. They’ll join us later. A dozen men wait for you past the ferry. Here is Captain Ulric.”

The captain emerged from the river gate, spoke tersely and in a low voice with the pair of guards who had let them all through, and stepped back to allow Baldwin to pass through. Baldwin paused with a hand half raised in the air, as if touching something he had not seen for years. He turned, searching, and found Ivar.

“They say I’m to ride south, so that she’ll follow me and not suspect what’s happening. Is that right?”

“That’s right, Baldwin. That’s the plan. She’ll follow the light that shines brightest to her.”

Baldwin reached into his sleeve and withdrew a rolled parchment bound with leather. “Here it is. A letter calling for the biscop’s release and stating that as long as she departs Varre and never returns she is free to go, otherwise her life is forfeit. I thought it was most believable done that way. She’s not merciful.”

He offered it. Hand shaking, Ivar took it from him. He was hot and cold at once. Words had abandoned him. He tugged the lapis lazuli ring off his finger and pressed it into Baldwin’s warm palm.

Baldwin slipped the ring onto his own finger, held Ivar’s gaze a moment longer, and turned to the captain. “I’m ready.”

“Erkanwulf will guide you,” said the captain.

The pair moved away into the night, although the taper’s light was visible for an interminable interval as they made their way up the strand.

The parchment Ivar held paralyzed him. That quickly, Baldwin was gone, torn from him again. And anyway, he was so unaccustomed to succeeding that it seemed impossible he just had.

“I’ll ride with you to the ferry,” said the captain. “Sergeant Hugo will accompany you to Queen’s Grave. The rest of us
will meet you as soon as we can on the road to Kassel. Go then. Go with God. May She watch over you.”

Only later, after he had crossed the river and felt its swirl and spray against his face, did he realize that Captain Ulric had spoken those last words without a trace of self-consciousness.

May
She
watch over you
.

In Autun, at any rate, belief in the Redemption had triumphed, and he had to wonder: was it Lady Tallia’s example, or Baldwin’s, that had won the most converts?

WITH his hair concealed under a dirty coif and a boiled leather helmet on his head, Ivar stood among the dozen soldiers who acted as his cover and watched as Sergeant Hugo delivered the false order to Captain Tammus.

“Being sent into exile?” demanded the scarred captain after the deacon who presided over the camp’s chapel read the missive out loud.

“I just does as I’m told,” said Sergeant Hugo with a shrug. “Still, there’s troubles along the Salian borders worse these days than ever. I hear tell of famine. Lady Sabella needs all her troops for other business. Best to be rid of them. They can starve in Wendar as well as here.”

“Easier to kill them.” Tammus had a way of squinting that made his scars twist and pucker. He was an evil-looking man, with a vile temper to match, but he wasn’t stupid. Ivar was careful to keep his head lowered. Tammus might remember his face. There had been only three young men interred in Queen’s Grave, and his “death” had been so very public and unexpected and dramatic. His hands felt clammy. Despite the chill, he was sweating.

“No orders about killing,” said Hugo without expression. “We’re to escort them to the border with Fesse and let them go on their own. That’s all I know.”

Tammus grunted. He took the parchment from the deacon and sniffed at the seal, then licked it, spat, and handed it back to the woman.

“It is genuine,” said the deacon, sure of her ground but hesitant as she eyed him fearfully. She had, Ivar saw, a fading bruise on her right cheek. “The seal is that of the duchess, which she keeps on her person. The calligraphy is in an exceptionally fine hand. I recognize it from other letters she has sent this past year.”

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand as he surveyed the dozen men-at-arms waiting beside horses, two carts, and a dozen donkeys and mules. They had tracked down Captain Tammus easily enough in the camp that lay outside the palisade. His was the largest house, two whole rooms, and the only one whose walls were freshly whitewashed. The camp looked unkempt and half deserted. Mud slopped the pathways. Ivar heard no clucking of chickens, although the guardsmen had once held a significant flock, taxed out of the nearby villages. Bored and surly-looking soldiers had gathered, but there were only a dozen of them, of whom half scratched at rashes blistering their faces and two limped. They looked to be no match for Hugo’s troop, who were healthier and had, in addition, a strength of purpose that lent iron to their resolve.

Why did we not think to do this sooner
?

It was a foolish thought. Until his escape, no one in Queen’s Grave had opportunity to speak freely to those outside.

“You have until nightfall,” Tammus growled at last.

Hugo hesitated, as if to argue, but did not. He snapped his fingers, and his men mounted and rode briskly to the gates, which were opened at Tammus’ order. After they rode through, the gates were shoved shut behind them.

“Something’s wrong,” said Ivar.

He dismounted. The bare ground, covered with a sheen of ice, crackled beneath his boots as he walked forward. He knew this landscape well enough. He had had many months to learn its contours. He had lost track of the time since he had escaped, but it had been nine or ten months, early summer then and the end of winter now. In that time
the tidy gardens, fields, and orchards had gone untended, so it appeared. Worst, a dozen new graves marked the cemetery plot north of the infirmary. He recognized them because of the heaps of earth, yet not one bore a wooden Circle staked into the ground or a crude headstone.

It was deadly quiet. Not a soul stirred, not even come to see what the noise was or to investigate the whickering of horses and the sound of armed men.

He dropped his reins and ran for the compound, past the abandoned sheep pasture and the wildly overgrown bramble where once goats had feasted. The front door was stuck, canted sideways because of broken hinges. He yanked it open, grunting and swearing and crying, and tumbled into the vacant entry hall, sprinted, shouting, into the biscop’s audience chamber, but it, too, lay empty. Even her writing desk was gone. He bolted out into the courtyard. Sister Bona’s grave lay bare, untended except for a dandelion.

Abandoned.

Were they all dead? But if so, wouldn’t Captain Tammus have known? Or had he simply ceased to care?

“Ivar?”

He spun, hearing that gentle voice but seeing no one. “Hathumod? Ai, God!” He was weeping with frustration and fear. “Where are you? Where is everyone?”

Forever ago, or so it seemed because it was a moment he preferred not to recall, pretty young Sister Bona had crawled out of the courtyard past a loose board. It jiggled now, and he grabbed it and wrenched it to one side, then cursed, because he’d gotten a splinter deep in his palm.

Hathumod’s face blinked at him out of the shadows.

“What are you
doing
in there?” he demanded.

“Ivar! Oh, Ivar.” She was weeping. “I thought you were dead.”

“I pray you, Hathumod. Come out! What are you doing in there?”

She shoved the loose board aside and clambered out. Once, she would have been too stout to squeeze through, but she was so thin now that it hurt to look at her, all skin stretched over knobby bones. She had lost that rabbity
look, although her protruding front teeth stood out more starkly than ever with no plump cheeks to give harmony to her features.

“We have stores hidden in here that we don’t want the guards to know about.”

“Where is everyone?”

“We had to retreat to the amphitheater, at the head of the valley. It was too dangerous to stay here.”

“Why?”

She stared at him as if he had said something particularly stupid. “Because of the sickness, of course!” Her lips quivered. She burst into tears. “So many dead we couldn’t bury them decently. And we were all feared we would die, too.”

“Who still lives? What of Sigfrid and Ermanrich? What of the biscop?”

“Th–they live. Th–they aren’t the ones…. It’s been so awful.” She tried to gulp down her sobs. She rubbed angrily at her face, but she could not stop crying. His intense relief at discovering that some still lived made him furious.

“Take me to them! We have only until nightfall.”

“F–for what?”

“To free you.”

She wailed, bawling.

He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Hathumod! We must go quickly!”

“I—if only you’d come last autumn. Half our number are dead.”

“Hurry!”

He grabbed her wrist and she followed him meekly outside. Hugo’s men had fanned out to explore the compound, but Ivar called them back.

“There are stores hidden behind a loose board in the courtyard. Get those, and abandon the rest. There was a terrible sickness here. The demons who cause it might still be lurking. Sergeant, stay here and make ready. Half your men and the mounts come with us.”

They rode down the path that led past the vegetable garden and the grain fields. Hathumod wept, unable to stop herself.

“Who feeds them?” asked one of the soldiers. “Ground’s not been broken up or even ploughed.”

“The guards are feared to come in,” Hathumod sobbed, “on account of the sickness.”

They had built a pair of huts within the hollow of the amphitheater, protected somewhat by the high ridgeline. Four scrawny goats grazed in brambles at the limit of their tethers. Six sheep mowed the amphitheater slope; none had lambed or were even pregnant. Ivar did not see the community’s ram.

The monastics had heard the sound of horses and were waiting, clustered around the seated biscop. Like the others, Constance had grown thin, and thinness made her look old, frail, and weary. No more than a dozen huddled fearfully with the forest at their back. Ivar recognized Sigfrid’s impossibly petite form at once, but Ermanrich seemed to be missing. Nay, that was him standing next to Sigfrid, only he was shrunken in girth, a stick, looking none the healthier for having lost his energetic stoutness. His face was pale and his chin scumbled with a half grown beard, but it was his features that lit first.

“Ivar! It’s Ivar! I knew he would come back!” He hobbled forward; something was wrong with his right foot, and as soon as Ivar dismounted he flung his arms around him in a warm embrace.

“No time.” Ivar pushed him away. He gauged the heavens and the shifting light that marked the waning afternoon. “We must leave now, while we have the chance. We have an order, sealed by Lady Sabella’s seal and thereby binding. You are exiled from Varre, free to go as long as you cross into Wendar and do not return.”

Some wept, but Biscop Constance in her calm way asked the first, and only, question. “Who has written this false command, knowing themselves a rebel against Lady Sabella? Such an act is treason, punishable by death. Was it one of the clerics I trained? I thought them all exiled from her court.”

“It was Baldwin.”

“Baldwin!” cried Ermanrich.

“Baldwin can’t write,” objected Hathumod from behind him.

“That is enough,” said Constance. “I will need assistance. I cannot ride.”

Ivar nodded. “We have a cart and two mules to draw it. We have mounts for everyone. How are there so few left?”

“There are three out in the woods gathering,” said Constance, “but it is true we are few in number. Sister Nanthild was first to die of the illness. It struck after the night of the wind. We lost half our number. It is only since we left the compound and came to live here that the deaths have ceased. I believe that the well is poisoned. You see how weak we are. If you had not come, Brother Ivar, I fear we would all have perished by summer from starvation. The guards refused to cross the gate or even bring us baskets of grain. The ram died, and the only pregnant ewe miscarried. We have not seen the sun for so many months we have forgotten what it feels like to enjoy its brilliant lamp. Plants cannot flourish without sun. Likewise, rainfall is erratic. God is angry, so I am convinced.”

“We must hurry.” He did not like to think that it might all be for naught, that he might rescue them and yet still fail. The world had so changed that he no longer recognized it. Like a cloudy day, it had gone all shadowed and dim. “Let us go.”

The three gone into the woods to forage were found. The rest had to bundle up their valuable possessions, to fold them into saddlebags and cloth sacks and or toss them into the back of the second cart or over the withers of their mules: blankets, cloaks, tunics, weed hooks, shovels, sickles, and scythes as well as awls, knives, kitchen implements, and a salt cellar; a silver ewer and four copper basins; needles, skeins of yarn, three spindles, and six fleeces also used for bedding; a leather chest containing the biscop’s scribal tools; two psalters, three Holy Verses, and four other books, one of them a scroll of St. Augustina’s
Confessions
and another a history of Varren princes. What remained of their stock of dried herbs taken from the infirmary and stored in a small wooden chest. An ivory-and-gold reliquary
containing the bones of the left hand of the founder, Queen Gertruda.

They met up with Sergeant Hugo at the gates with daylight to spare and rumbled out through the guards’ encampment in a silent line of riders with the two carts positioned in the middle of the procession. Captain Tammus stared. He seemed ready to spit, but like them, he said nothing. No one, apparently, wanted to risk touching them. Before they’d rolled out of sight, a half dozen guards ran through the open gates to see what they could loot. The last Ivar saw of the gate was the men running back out again with nothing in their hands, scared off, no doubt, by the sight of those forbidding graves.