In the Ruins (5 page)

“Is it the end of the world, my lord pr—Your Majesty?” Lewenhardt whispered.

“If it is the end, then why are we not dead? Nay, Lewenhardt, it is as it seems. A terrible cataclysm has overtaken us. We may yet survive if we keep our wits about us, and if we hold together.”

Duke Burchard drew the Circle of Unity at his chest, but said nothing. The old man seemed too stunned to speak. He was not alone in this. For every soldier who exclaimed out loud at the scorched forest and the marks of the recent flood there were four or five who gaped at the devastation as though they had, indeed, lost their wits.

“I dislike this, Your Majesty,” said Fulk. “What if the sea returns?”

“We must see. Besides Queen Adelheid, we must seek out those who survived and hid until daybreak. Liutgard said many of the Aostans marched west along the coast. What of them?”

Pools of salty water filled the ruts in the road, and a gloomy vista awaited them when at last they emerged from the trees and gazed through the swirling ash that obscured the bay of Estriana, half a league away. The plain looked strangely scumbled, strewn with debris. He could not mark the field where the battle had been fought or the line of
their retreat because branches and corpses and planks from wagons and all manner of flotsam lay tumbled everywhere. He saw no life at all in the distant town.

“You are sure?” he asked Duke Burchard. “You left Queen Adelheid behind in Estriana?”

The old man’s voice was more like a croak. “So I did, Your Majesty. She held a reserve behind the walls in case of disaster. It was already agreed that she would remain in the tower rather than sortie out. She is a strategist, Your Majesty, not a soldier.”

“So she is,” agreed Sanglant, “if she yet lives. I walked right into the ambush she and Henry laid between them.”

Burchard shook his head impatiently. “We saw well enough what trap Henry fell into. The daimone with which Presbyter Hugh ensorcelled him spoke his words and moved his limbs according to the presbyter’s command. Henry did not speak. That plan was the queen’s alone.”

“She is a formidable opponent, then. What do we do with her now?”

Staring across the plain toward the Middle Sea, Burchard wept softly. “Perhaps bury her?”

The pall of dust hid the waters, which seemed, impossibly, at low tide, drawn far back across tidal flats.

“Ai, God!” cried Lewenhardt, who possessed the sharpest gaze among them, able to pierce the haze. “Look!”

The water was rising swiftly. It swelled at the mouth of the bay into a monstrous wave that crested into a wall of foaming white. The wave surged forward across the bay and smashed down onto the town and the shoreline, engulfing it and inundating the land. The water rose up and up, still climbing as it flooded the plain.

“Run!”

The others turned and fled. Sanglant could not bring himself to move. He could not
quite
believe, despite the evidence of his eyes, that the sea could rise so fast and run so far. The whiter crest that battered the town dissipated quickly, subsumed in the vast tidal swell that rolled inland across the plain. Fest snorted and shied, and he reined him in, turning in a complete circle before the horse settled, uneasy and in protest but holding fast.

“My lord prince!” cried Captain Fulk, returning in haste to rein up beside him. “We’ll be drowned. You must come!”

The tide lapped to its highest extent a stone’s toss from Fest, not even reaching the outlying trees of the forest, and sucked hissing and burbling back into the sea. All that lay strewn over the plain from the first surge rushed outward with it. Even the stone walls of Estriana toppled into the wave, all but the highest tower, which was protected by a double ring of walls that had taken the brunt of the impact.

His men, creeping back, wept to witness the sea’s fury. As the wave receded, the ruins of the town emerged from the water. The stone walls were shattered at a dozen places. Seen through those gaps, the buildings looked like piles of sticks.

“Ai, God!” cried Duke Burchard. “Queen Adelheid must surely be dead! No one could have survived such a deluge!” He glanced at Sanglant and wiped his brow nervously. “Surely she had a reason for the terrible course she took, Your Majesty. Surely she did not wish to harm the king. She loved him. She is a good woman.”

“Let us hope we do not have to make decisions as cruel as the one she felt herself forced to make,” replied Sanglant.

“I think it most prudent if we retreat,” said Fulk. “We have seen that these unnatural tides are not yet faded. Look how the water sucks back out again. What if a larger surge comes?”

“Look,” said Lewenhardt. “Something is moving out there!”

Sanglant dismounted.

“Your Majesty!” protested Captain Fulk

“I’ll walk. The footing looks too tricky for horses.”

“Why go at all? If you’re swept away—”

“I think we have time. The second wave did not approach until we had walked all the way from the old fort. If you have ever sat upon the sea’s shore and watched the waves, Captain, you will have seen they have a rhythm of their own. These great waves need time to approach.”

Fulk had stood firm through many terrible events when
others quailed and faltered, and although the prospect of drowning clearly horrified him, he did not fail Sanglant now. “Very well. I’ll come with you, Your Majesty.”

Sanglant grinned and strode forward. The ground was not hopelessly muddy because the tide had come up and receded too swiftly to soak in, but damp ash made the ground slick and debris from the forest caught about their ankles and snagged in their leggings. It was not silent but uncannily still, with no sign of life but their own soft footsteps. The hissing fall of ash serenaded them. Maybe it would never stop raining down. Perhaps the heavens themselves had burned and now shed the soot of their destruction over the earth. The throttling gurgle of the sea faded in the distance as the tide receded back and back beyond the tidal flats, although it was difficult to see anything clearly through the haze. Now and again they caught the scent of rot.

They walked out onto the plain, glancing back at intervals to see the forest, farther away each time, and the troop clustered at the fringe of the trees, obscured by falling ash.

“Are you sure Lewenhardt saw anything, Your Majesty?” Fulk asked at last. “It could have been the wind. It’s hard to see anything with all this cloud and ash.”

“Hush.” Sanglant held up a hand, and Fulk fell silent, not moving, chin lifted as he, too, strove to hear. But few men had the unnaturally keen hearing that Sanglant possessed, and Fulk could not hear the faint sounds of splashing. “It sounds like a fish flopping half out of water. There!”

A ditch had captured something living that now thrashed in a remnant of seawater. They came cautiously to the edge and stared down into a pit filled with a murky blend of mud, water, and scraps of vegetation. A corpse was fixed between the axles of a shattered wagon, face mercifully hidden by one wheel, legs gray where they stuck out of the scummy surface.

“Ai, God!” cried Fulk, stepping back in horror.

The tide had trapped a monster from the deeps. Sensing them, it heaved its body fully back into the water with a splash, but it had nowhere to hide. They could distinguish
its huge tail sluicing back and forth. At last it reared up out of the mud defiantly, whipping its head side to side and spraying mud and flecks of grass and leaves everywhere. Its hair hissed and snapped at them, each strand like an eyeless eel seeking a meal out of the air. It had a man’s torso, lean and powerful, shimmering with scales. It had a face, of a kind: flat eyes, slits where a nose should otherwise grow, a lipless mouth, and scaly hands webbed between its clawed fingers.

“It’s a man-fish,” whispered Fulk. “That kind we saw on the river!”

It was trapped and therefore doomed, washed in and stranded by the tide, but a fearsome beast nevertheless and therefore not worthy of mercy. Yet Sanglant frowned as Fulk drew his sword. The creature stared boldly at them. Sharp teeth gleamed as it opened its mouth. And spoke.

“Prinss Ssanglant. Cap’tin Fulk.”

Fulk jumped backward. “How can this beast know our names!”

“Prinss Ssanglant,” it repeated. The eels that were its hair hissed and writhed as though they, too, voiced a message, one he could not understand.

“Can you speak Wendish? What are you? What are you called?”

“
Gnat
,” it seemed to say, yet it kept talking in a language he did not understand, although he had heard it before.

“That’s Jinna.”

“It’s too garbled, Your Majesty. I can’t tell.”

“Can you speak Wendish?” he said slowly, because he knew no words of Jinna. He tried out the other languages he could stumble along in. “Can you speak Ungrian? Can you speak the tongue known to the Quman? Can you—”

“Liat’ano,” it said, lifting a hand in pantomime to shade its flat eyes as would a man staring into the bright sun.

“Liathano! Do you speak of my wife, Liath?”

The creature hissed, as in agreement.

“What does this mean, my lord prince?” whispered Fulk. “How can such a monster know our names?”

“I don’t know. How could such a creature have learned to speak Jinna?”

“Jinna!” The creature spoke again at length, but they could only shake their heads. Impatience burned at him like fire as he wondered what this creature knew and what it could tell him. Did Liath live, or was she dead? How did it recognize them?

“Are there any in our party who can speak the language of the Jinna?” asked Fulk.

“Only Liath,” he said bitterly. “That’s why she took those two Jinna servants with her. She was the only one who could understand them.”

“What do we do?”

“Drag it back to the sea. If it can speak, then it is no mute beast but a thinking creature like us.”

“What if it is our enemy? You see its teeth and claws. I heard the stories the ship-master told us—that it eats human flesh.”

“It is at our mercy.” He shook his head. “It gives me hope that my wife still lives. For that reason alone I can’t kill it, or leave it to die, as it surely will, stranded here.”

It was, indeed, no mute beast. He gestured toward the sea. He spoke his own name, and Liath’s, and Fulk’s, and gestured toward the sea again, as the creature stared at them. When they clambered down the crumbling bank and grabbed its arms, it did not fight them. It was heavy, and strange, and difficult to drag although its glistening tail slid easily over most obstacles. In the end, out of breath and sloppy with mud and ash, they got it to what had once been the shoreline. The sea had sucked well out into the bay, but they dared not walk there among slick rocks knowing that the next wave would come soon.

“Go with the Lord and Lady’s grace,” said Sanglant. “There is nothing more we can do for you.”

“Liat’ano,” it said again, and pointed toward the sky and then toward the ground.

“Does she live?” Sanglant asked, knowing that the pain in his heart would never cease, not until he knew what fate had befallen her and their daughter. He had lost so much, as they all had, but he feared there was worse yet to come.

Lying there awkwardly on the ground, it glanced toward the sea, then copied with eerie precision his earlier gesture.
It waved toward the forest, suggesting haste, and said a curt word, repeated twice, something like
Go. Go
. It had the cadence of a warning. Surely it could sense the tides of the sea better than he could. Fulk shifted from one foot to the next, glancing from the creature to the sea and back again.

“Ai, God!” swore Sanglant. “Come, Fulk.”

They left, jogging across the plain. In places the tide had swept the ground clear. Elsewhere, ditches, small ridges, or other obstacles had caught debris in a wide swathe, corpses and branches and here and there a weapon or wagon wheel tangled together and stinking as the hours passed. Nothing moved on that plain. There was still no sign of life among the broken walls of the town. No birds flew, and now and again lightning brightened the clouds, followed by a distant rumbling of thunder.

They heard the water rising before they reached the soldiers waiting for them at the edge of the forest, nervous as they listened and watched the glimmer of the sea. He turned as the rest of the troop hurried away along the road into the cover of the blasted trees. The water rose this time not in any distinguishable wave but as a great swell. He could not see the mer-creature. The light wasn’t strong enough, and the shoreline was, in any case, too far away and the ground too uneven. Like the rest of them, it would survive the tide of destruction, or it would perish.

A dozen men waited at the verge, unwilling to depart without their prince. Without their
king
.

“She must still be alive,” he said.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Fulk.

Lewenhardt offered him reins. Sanglant mounted Fest and together the remnants of his once proud company rode into the trees.

“I looked through fire for those whose faces I know, Your Majesty, but I saw nothing.”

Sanglant glanced toward his council members waiting on the ramp that led up into the ruined fortress. The army had settled down under the afternoon haze to lick its wounds, recover its strength, and assess its numbers and provisions. “The Seven Sleepers may have protected themselves from Eagle’s Sight. We must act as if they still live. They remain a threat.”

Hathui shrugged. “I saw flames and shadow. Flashes of things. An overturned wagon. Falling rocks. A horse killed by a falling branch. None of it made any sense, nor could I hold any one vision within the fire. And of Liath, I saw nothing.”

“Ai, God!” He paced, kicking up ash, and spun to face her. “Seek her at nightfall, each night, and hope she seeks in turn.”

“Nightfall is difficult to gauge with this cloud cover and ash fall, Your Majesty. We might each seek the other every evening and never touch. The Eagle’s Sight is a powerful gift, but a man butchering a deer has more accuracy and delicacy.”

He laughed, more in pain than amusement. “The crowns have the same failing, do they not? Thus we are spared the weight of a power too great to combat by natural means. I no longer wonder—” He swept an arm wide to indicate the heavens and the shattered forest. “—why the church condemned sorcery. See what sorcery has wrought.”