In the Ruins (53 page)

The household had their own taxes to gather and make ready to deliver to the chatelaine, but Bel made sure they ate well and drank well that night.

He slept easily, although others fretted at his leaving. The pallet he slept on in the hall was not the one he had grown up sleeping on, back in the village. The estate, however fine it was, had no hold on him because these surroundings were only a way station. He had left Osna village years ago. That leave-taking could not take place a second time.

In the morning, a dozen accompanied him to Osna: Henri, Bel, Stancy, Artald, Agnes, Julien with his Varingian spear, five of the workers armed with staves and shovels, and little Blanche because she refused to remain behind. Bruno was left at the workshop with the rest of the household, just in case, in these difficult times, some cunning soul had planned a ruse in order to loot or burn the estate while it was undefended. Aunt Bel was famous for her careful and farsighted ways, and many would suspect that her storehouses remained well stocked, as indeed they did.

“We ought to put up a palisade,” said Artald as he swung along beside Stancy. He steadied her at the elbow as she picked her way over a series of ruts worn into the path. “I’ve been speaking of it for three years now. Past time we started.”

“Have a care,” called Julien from the front. They came up behind a score of ragged folk who, seeing them, shrank back into the trees. A child wailed and was hushed. All of the children had sunken eyes and swollen bellies. The adults, all women except two toothless old men, drew the little ones back and ducked their heads.

“I pray you, good folk,” said one of the women, creeping forward on her knees. “A scrap of bread, if you have it. Pray God.” One of her eyes was crusted shut with dried pus.

Behind her, others coughed, or scratched sores and pustules. One woman had a scaly rash splattered down the
right side of her face and ringing her neck like a strangling cord.

Alain stepped forward, still holding Blanche’s hand.

“They’re dirty!” she cried. “I hate them!”

He pulled two loaves of bread from the pouch on his back and gave one to the child. “Here.”

“That’s your waybread, Alain!” objected Aunt Bel. “You’ll go hungry!”

“Pray do not worry on my account, Aunt.” He turned back to Blanche. “This is your offering to make, and you must make it.”

“Can’t! I’m scared!” she whined. “I hate them.”

“Blanche,” he said kindly, looking her in the face.

Weeping, she shuffled forward, shoved the bread into the hands of the creeping woman, then bolted back to the safety of the hounds, pulling on their ears until Rage nipped gently at her to get her to let go.

“Do not fight among yourselves,” said Alain as the other refugees converged on the woman, who clutched the loaf to her chest. He marked among them a girl no more than Agnes’ age whose cheeks were so hollow that you could trace the skull beneath stretched skin. He gave her the other loaf. “Listen! Let all be satisfied that you have each dealt fairly with the others. Otherwise you will never know peace.”

All were silent as they walked on, leaving the beggars behind. At last, as the woodlands were cut with the fields and clearings that signaled the advent of village lands, Agnes spoke.

“How could you understand them, Alain?”

“They were Salians,” said Henri. “I know enough of that language to trade in Medemelacha.” He glanced at the girl, who paled when he said the name, and reached out to squeeze her hand. “There, there, lass. He may yet be alive. That report I heard might have been wrong.”

“It would be easier if I knew,” she murmured as she wiped her eyes.

“True enough,” agreed Henri. “Poor child.”

“God must hate them, too,” said Blanche. “Otherwise why would they be sick? Only bad people suffer. If they did a bad thing, they’ll be punished.”

“That being so,” snapped Agnes, “why are you not covered with weeping sores and white scales? Why hasn’t your nose fallen off?” Her face got red, and she began to cry.

“Enough!” said Aunt Bel. “I’ll not come walking into the village with the pair of you snarling like dogs fighting over a bone! For shame!”

“It’s a long way to walk,” said Artald. “From the border with Salia all the way up to here. Days and days walking, a month maybe. They must have been right desperate to leave their home.”

“They looked desperate to me,” said Stancy. “Poor creatures. Who knows how many they started with and how many lost along the way. It’s the fault of those Eika raiders.”

“Mayhap not,” said Henri, “for it seemed to me there was peace in Medemelacha, and order, too. I saw no beggars on those streets.”

“Driven out or murdered,” suggested Aunt Bel, “so as not to bother them who didn’t wish to share. Who stole all good things for themselves.”

“Perhaps,” said Henri, “but I saw Eika and human folk working side by side. None of them looked like they were starving. I don’t know. What do you think, Alain?”

Alain had been staring at the clouds, wondering if the light had changed, heralding a change in the dense layer and perhaps promising sunshine. The talk had flowed past him, although he heard it all. “War brings hunger in its wake. What is this now, these clouds, these sickly fields, this fear and these portents, if not echoes of an ancient war?”

“It’s God’s will if the sun don’t shine, or the rains don’t fall,” said Artald. “So Deacon teaches.”

“That storm last autumn was not made by God,” said Alain. “That was made by human hands, in ancient days.”

They looked at him, as they always did, as if they did not know if he were a madman or a prophet, and then looked at each other and away again, at the trees, at the clouds, at the startling appearance of a robin hopping along the ground under the skeletal branches of an oak.

“Look there!” cried Stancy. “Look at that!”

“Mayhap spring will come after all,” said Henri.

The others kept walking, but Alain halted and with a gesture commanded the hounds to move away down the road. Blanche hovered beside him as he moved slowly forward until he was close enough to kneel and stretch out his hand. He breathed, finding the rhythm of the wind in the weeds and the respiration of the tree. The bird hopped toward him, then onto his palm, turning its head to stare at him first with the right eye, then the left. That gaze was black and bright, touched with a shine.

“Come quietly and slowly, Blanche, and kneel beside me. No fast movements.”

Scarcely breathing, she crouched next to him and held out her hand. After a moment, the robin hopped onto her fingers, gave her that same piercing examination, and abruptly spread its wings and flew away.

She burst into tears. “How do you
do
that?”

“Just be patient, little one. If you find what is quiet within yourself, even the wild creatures will trust you.”

“No one trusts me.”

“That robin did.”

She sniffed, wiping eyes and nose.

“Best come now,” he said. “Let’s hope we see more birds this spring, for it’s an ill portent to have them all vanish like that.” He tilted his head back to look up into the bare trees. “For so it was then. An ill portent.”

“Here, lad, are you having another headache?” Henri had returned, leaving the others waiting up the road. “Let me help you up if you’re not feeling well. No need to go on today if you’ve a mind to go back home.”

“No, no, Father. I’m well enough. Just remembering a forest once where all the birds had fled. But there was a terrible black heart alive in that place. That was why they fled. They feared evil.”

Henri looked around nervously as Blanche whimpered. “Think you we’re haunted?”

“Here?” He patted Blanche tenderly on the head. “Nay, I think it was the wind blew the poor creatures so far that it’s taken them this long, those that survived, to find their way back home.”

“So it may be,” said Henri, still holding his arm and gazing
at him. “So it may be. A poor creature may be blown a far way indeed before it turns its gaze toward home.”

They caught up to the others, who set on their way without question or comment. They smelled the tannery before they saw it, and marked the square steeple of the village church rising above trees. In the common ground and meadow in front of the church, an assembly had gathered by the chair and table where the count’s chatelaine held court to choose young folk to serve for a year at Lavas Holding and to receive the tithes and taxes the village paid to the count in exchange for his protection in times of war. Alain did not at first recognize the old woman who sat at the table. It was not until she looked up and saw
him
walking among his kinfolk, and turned her face away in shame, that he realized this woman was Chatelaine Dhuoda, but so aged with white hair and wrinkled face that anyone might be excused for mistaking her for a woman twenty years older.

She rose and, bracing herself on a cane, came around the table. As the crowd parted to let him through, she dropped to her knees.

“I beg you, my lord, return to Lavas Holding. Forgive us our sins. Come back.”

Henri whistled under his breath. Sorrow barked. The chatelaine, noticing the two black hounds, wept quietly.

“Does Lord Geoffrey know you are here?” Alain asked.

“He does not, my lord. He is the false one. He lied to gain the county for his daughter.”

“Did he? Is he not descended legitimately from the brother of the old count, Lavastina, she who was mother of the first Charles Lavastine and great grandmother of Lavastine?”

“He is, my lord.”

“How has he lied?”

“If he had not lied, then why do we suffer? He abused you, my lord, because he feared you. Why would he fear you if he did not believe that you were, in truth, Lavastine’s rightful heir?”

He nodded. “I’ll go, Mistress Dhuoda.”

“To Lavas Holding?”

“I’ll go, because I must. But I pray you, do not address me as ‘my lord.’ It isn’t fitting. I am not the heir to Lavas County.”

“Yet the hounds, my lord!” Angry, she gestured toward the hounds, who sat one to his right and one to his left. “The hounds are proof! They never obeyed any man but the Lavas heir!”

“Is that the truth?” he asked her. “Or are you only looking at it from the wrong side? Any man but the Lavas heir, or any man but the heir of the elder Charles?”

“I don’t understand you, my lord. The hounds themselves are the proof.”

“I am ready to leave,” he said, “as soon as you are able to go.”

It took her only until midday to collect what little Osna village could afford this year in taxes, and as Lavas Holding hadn’t the wherewithal, so she said, to feed any more mouths, she took no young folk out of the village to serve the count for the customary year. The cleric with her filled in the account book that listed payments and shortfalls, and there were far more of the latter than the former.

“It seems you will leave us again,” said Aunt Bel to Alain, “and it grieves me that you go. I do not know when we will see you.”

“I do not know,” he told her. “My path has been a strange one. I know only that our way must part here.”

She wept, but only a little. “There is always a place for you with us, Alain, though I think you are not really ours.”

He kissed her, and she hugged him. The others, too, gave him in turn a parting wish and a kiss or an embrace, depending on their nature.

“I pray you,” he said to Stancy and Artald, “stay strong, and keep the others well. Do not let the family splinter.”

“Be temperate,” he said to Julien, and to Agnes, “Don’t wait forever. Marry again in another year, if you’ve had no word of your lost husband.”

“I should go to Medemelacha myself!” she said fiercely, but in an undertone, so the others wouldn’t hear. “But Uncle won’t let me. He says it’s the place of women to
guard the hearth and men to do the dangerous traveling, as it says in the Holy Verses. Everyone says I should just marry Fotho, but I don’t want to! I want to go to Medemelacha and see if there’s any news of Guy.”

“Then make a bargain. If they let you go this spring, when the sea is passable, and if you find no word of him, you’ll make no objection to marrying as Aunt Bel wishes.”

All this time Blanche clung to his arm, lips pinched together and expression so curdled that it would turn sweet milk to sour.

He came to Henri last of all.

“I am sorry to see you leaving, Son. But I know you must go. You were never ours, only a gift we held for a time until it was reclaimed.”

At last, what calm had sustained him shattered. Alain could not speak as he embraced the man who had raised him. Blanche began to wail.

“No! No! I won’t let you go!”

Henri looked both amused and annoyed, as they all did when dealing with Blanche. “You’ll have a hard time scraping that barnacle off.”

“Perhaps.” Alain did not try to dislodge her, although the others came swarming to scold at her and tug at her. “Perhaps best not to,” he said, which made them all regard him in surprise.

“What do you mean?” Aunt Bel asked.

Julien was flushed, looking ashamed, and Agnes rolled her eyes in disgust.

“She doesn’t thrive,” said Alain. “She’s like a tree growing all twisted, and not straight. Let me take her with me as far as Lavas Holding.”

“Who will care for her?” demanded Agnes. “Who would show kindness to a creature as unlikable as she is?”

“They’d as like turn her out with the chickens as keep her in the house,” said Stancy. “Poor mite.” She looked at Julien, who only ducked his head. “If you’d speak up for her more, Jul, and scold her when she’s deserved it, then she might not be what she is.”

“No! I won’t let you leave!” Blanche shrieked, too caught up in her tantrum to listen.

“I can see that she is taken care of.”

“I don’t like it,” said Aunt Bel. “Lavas Holding hasn’t enough to take in young folk for their year of service, the chatelaine said so herself. I won’t have it said I turned out my own grandchild and sent her to scratch with the chickens.”

“Do you trust me, Aunt Bel?”

“Well, truly, lad, I do.”

“Let me see what can be made of her in fresh soil.” That they none of them liked the child made them too ashamed to agree. “Blanche! Hush!”