In the Ruins (72 page)

He was a monster, no different than the monsters that
stalked him. Hate flowered, but she lowered her eyes so as not to betray herself.

“A cup of ale in celebration, my lord?” asked scarred John. She glanced up to see the soldier arrive with a cup in each hand.

Hugh smiled. Strange to think how beautiful he was. Impossible not to be swayed by beauty, by light, by an arrogance that, softened, seems like benevolence. All of it illusion.

So might the Enemy smile, seeing a soul ripe for the Abyss.

So might the Enemy soothe with soft words and a kindly manner:
Come this way. Just a little farther
.

They drank.

“Here, now,” said scarred John, sounding surprised. “The girl survived! Yet see—is that the horse?” He made a retching sound. He shook with that rush which comes after the worst is over. “That would have been us! Sucked clean of flesh!” He clutched his stomach, looking queasy.

“So would we all have been,” agreed Hugh. “The Holy Mother Antonia controls many wicked creatures. She is a servant of the Enemy. Now you see why we must oppose her and Queen Adelheid, whom she holds on a tight leash.”

The others gathered where Anna lay, humiliated. She did not know what to do except let them stare at her and pick through the bones around her as though she were deaf and mute. At last, she crawled sideways to get away from them. None stopped her or offered her a hand up. Her leggings were soaked through, and a couple of the men waved hands before noses and commented on the stink.

“Is it safe now?” they asked Hugh, kicking the remains of the horse. “Can we sleep?”

“It is safe. Before we left, I instructed Brother Petrus to scatter skulls and bones in the woodland a day’s ride south of Novomo. After some fruitless searching, a loyal soldier will by seeming happenstance lead the searchers to these bones, and Mother Antonia will believe we are all dead, killed by those black demons, her galla.”

They all stared at him.

He nodded to acknowledge their amazement. “I knew the plan would work because Antonia remains ignorant of the extent of my knowledge. I know a shield—this spell I called—that would hide us from the sight of the galla. I had in my possession griffin feathers to send them back to their foul pit.”

“How did you come by such things, my lord?” asked scarred John, always curious. “It was said of the Wendish prince, the one who killed Emperor Henry, it was said he led a pair of griffins around like horses hitched to a wagon. But I never believed it.”

Captain Frigo stood with Princess Blessing draped over his shoulders like a lumpy sack of wheat, but she was breathing. “Hush! It is not our part to question Lord Hugh.”

Hugh’s smile was the most beautiful thing on Earth, no doubt. If only he had been flensed instead of the poor horse.

“Questions betray a thoughtful mind, Captain. Do not scold him.” He nodded toward John, who beamed in the light offered by the lamp’s flame, content in his master’s praise. Above, no stars shone. In the gray darkness, men settled restlessly into camp, still unnerved by their brush with death and sorcery. “I was brought up in the manner of clerics, John, to love God and to read those things written down by the holy church folk who have come before us. I had a book … I have it still, since I copied it out both on paper and in my mind. In it are told many secrets. As for the griffin feathers. Well.”

Anna clamped her mouth shut over the words she wanted to speak. Prince Sanglant had captured griffins. Had Lord Hugh done so as well? Had he, like Bulkezu, stalked and killed one of the beasts?

He twitched his head sideways, as at an amusing thought known only to himself. “Does it not say in the Holy Verses: ‘He who lays in stores in the summer is a capable son?’ I took what I found when the harvest was upon me.”

“And in the morning, my lord?” asked scarred John.

“At dawn,” he said, “we ride east.”

At midday the wind that had been dogging them all day died. Dust kicked up by the horses spattered right back down to the earth. No trees stood, although here and there hardy bushes sprouted pale shoots. The rolling countryside looked as dead as if a giant’s flaming hand had swept across it, knocking down all things and scorching the hills.

Blessing rode in silence behind Frigo. She had not spoken since he had knocked her unconscious, only stared stubbornly at the land ahead. Because Anna was watching her anxiously, fearful that she’d sustained some damage in her mind, she saw the girl’s aspect change. Her expression altered. Her body tensed. She saw something that shocked her.

“God save us,” said Frigo as the slope of the land fell away before them to expose a new landscape.

Now Anna saw it, too.

East, the country broke suddenly from normal ground into a ragged, rocky plain whose brownish-red surfaces bled an ominous color into the milky sky. Nothing grew there at all. It was a wasteland of rock.

“That’s not proper land,” muttered scarred John. “That’s demon work, that is.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said Theodore, “never in all the stories of the eastern frontier, and I’ve been a soldier for fifteen years and fought in Dalmiaka with the Emperor Henry and the good queen.” He glanced at Hugh. “As she was then.”

Hugh had not heard him. He, too, stared at this wilderness with the barest of smiles. “This is the power that killed Anne,” he said.

“What is it, my lord?” asked the captain. “Is it the Enemy’s work?”

“‘There will come to you a great calamity. The rivers will run uphill and the wind will become as a whirlpool. The mountains will become the sea and the sea become mountains. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood.”’

Every man there looked up at the cloudy heavens as if seeking the hidden sun.

“‘All that is lost will be reborn on this Earth,”’ he added.

They stared, hesitant to go forward.

Theodore broke their silence. “What’s that, my lord?” he said, pointing east into the wasteland of rock. “I thought I saw an animal moving out there.”

Hugh shook his head. “How can any creature traverse that? We’ll have to move down toward the sea.”

Although they did this, and although it was just possible to keep moving east by sticking to the strand, they rode anyway always with one eye twisted toward desolation. It was so cheerless and barren and frightening that Anna wept.

HE came with his entourage of treacherous Arethousans from whose lips fell lies, false jewels each one, because their ears had heard nothing but the teachings of the Patriarch, the apostate whose stubborn greed broke apart the True Church.

Adelheid’s soldiers waited in ranks beside the gate and along the avenues. Servants swarmed like galla, each dressed in what best clothing they could muster. All must appear formidable, the court of queen and empress. The court of the skopos, the only true intermediary between God and humankind.

Adelheid did not rise to greet him as his retinue reached the court before the audience hall. She sent Lady Lavinia outside to escort him in, while Captain Falco hurried inside to report.

“This must be, indeed, the fabled one-eyed general, Lord Alexandros.”

“The one we heard tales of when we marched in Dalmiaka?”

“The same, so it appears. It’s said he became a lord by
winning many victories for the emperor, who rewarded him with a noble wife and a fine title. He rides a handsome chestnut gelding and has a string of equally fine mounts, all chestnut. That suggests a man with vanity in his disposition.”

“Well observed, Captain.”

Adelheid wore a fine coronet of gold, but it looked a paltry thing to Antonia’s eyes compared to the imperial crown she should have been wearing. Still, Adelheid herself, robed in ermine, with face shining, looked impressive enough to stop any man in his tracks and distract him from such tedious details as the richness of her ornaments.

The queen’s gaze sharpened as movement darkened the opened double doors that led onto the colonnade fronting the hall. Antonia was seated to her right but at an equal height on the dais. From the doors, they would be seen side by side, neither given pride of place: the secular hand in hand with the sacred, as God had ordered the world below.

General Lord Alexandros entered with a brace of men to either side. Three carried decorated boxes in their hands and the fourth an object long and round and wrapped in cloth. All were dressed in red tabards belted over armor, except for the general himself. He wore a gold silk robe belted up and cut away for riding but still marked at the neck and under the arms and around the hips with the discolorations of the armor he’d been wearing over it. He had just come from the saddle, had only taken time to haul off his armor, but Adelheid had wished for this advantage: that he not be allowed any time to prepare himself but would be thrown headlong in all his travel dirt fresh into the melee.

The empress did not rise. Naturally, neither did Antonia.

He paused to survey the hall and the folk crowded there. That half were servants and commoners he would not know just from looking; all were handsomely dressed, and the lords and ladies who attended stood at the front of the assembly. He had, indeed, but one eye, that one a startling blue. The other was covered with a black patch. He was swarthy, in the manner of Arethousans, not particularly tall
but powerfully built through the shoulders and chest, a man confident of his prowess in battle.

“Now we will discover,” murmured Adelheid, “whether his wits are as well honed as his sword is said to be.”

She raised a hand. He strode forward, his men coming up behind. He alone was armed, with a sword sheathed in a plain leather scabbard. Of the rest of his men, none entered the hall.

He stopped before the dais, snapped his fingers, and mounted the steps as the attendant carrying the long object unfolded the cloth and opened it into a sturdy stool. As the general reached the second step, the man quickly placed the stool to the left of Adelheid’s throne and scurried back to kneel with the others.

General Lord Alexandros sat down.

Such audacity! Antonia found herself speechless. Indignant!

In the hall, folk caught their breath. Every gaze turned to the young empress.

Adelheid lifted one brow and measured him, and waited.

He snapped his fingers again. One by one the other men came forward, set their boxes at her feet, and opened them by means of cunning mechanisms fitted into the inlay decorating their exteriors.

From the first emerged a songbird, painted bright gold. It sang a pretty tune and turned back and forth, bobbing up and down as though alive. Adelheid forget herself so much that she clapped her hands in delight.

The second box revealed a rope of pearls of indescribable beauty. Each one was beyond price, and yet here were strung a thousand together. Light melted in their curves. Adelheid lifted up the rope, not without some effort, and let them slide across her lap.

General Lord Alexandros lifted two fingers, and the third man opened a jeweled box and displayed its contents to Antonia.

On a bed of finest gray silk lay the complete bones of a hand, fastened with gold wire.

“A song, to entertain,” he said in Dariyan, indicating the
cunning songbird with a gesture of his hand. His accent was coarse, but Antonia expected no fine words out of a lying Arethousan. “Pearls, of beauty and richness. For the Holy Mother of your people,” he finished, pointing at the skeletal hand, “a precious relic.”

“A relic?” Antonia examined the bones. They had no shine to them, nothing to indicate their special holiness. “Any man may sell a finger bone and say it is the relic of a holy saint.”

He shrugged, and it angered Antonia to see that her comment amused him. “So I am thinking. Perhaps it is only the bone of a cow herder. But it come from the most holy sanctuary of the Patriarch of the True Church. This is the hand of the St. Johanna the Messenger, a holy discipla of the blessed Daisan. Still, if you think it a fake, I will take it away.”

Adelheid’s eyes widened. She still held the pearls, but her gaze fixed on the hand. “A precious relic, indeed!” she breathed. “How came you to have it, General? Why bring it to us?”

He gestured. His four attendants touched their heads to the floor in the servile eastern style, backed away, and knelt at the foot of the dais.

“Your Majesty,” he said. “Holy Mother. I have no fine words. I am only a soldier. I speak with plain words, if you please.”

Antonia began to reply, knowing him impertinent and proud, but Adelheid forestalled her. The young empress was of that type of woman who is susceptible to the appearance of physical strength in a man, thinking that strong arms are preferable to strong faith and a righteous heart.

“Go on, General. I am listening.”

When he met Antonia’s gaze, it was clear he knew she did not approve of him. He judged her, as a man sizes up his opponent before opening battle, and made his attack.

“I ride a long road to come to Aosta. Many bad things I see. There is wasteland, a land of smoking rock. There is drought, dry land, sickness. There is empty land, all the people run away. There is starving. Above, we see no birds
but one time a great beast which has brightness like gold. We are attacked three times by beasts, these who have the form of men but the faces of animals. They are wearing armor which I see in the ancient paintings in the halls of Arethousa. The Cursed Ones are returned to Earth. Now they stalk us.”