In the Ruins (74 page)

Secha paused to take a sip of cleansing water and then stacked three stones in her sling, hoisted it, balanced it across her forehead and back, and trudged away on the path that snaked down a hillside to the White Road. Here, she turned west along the broad path, returning to the watchtower. She had one baby caught close to her chest; the other was with Rain, who had set up a temporary workshop with the building crew who were shaping stone for the repair and reconstruction of this watchtower.

All along the White Road, folk were building and repairing the fallen watchtowers. She had been at this work for five days now. It gave her something to do as she adjusted to her new life.

She passed an older man who was returning with an empty sling. He acknowledged her without quite looking her in the eye. Like all of those who had walked in the shadows, he was eager to move on, to stay away from her.

They feared her, because she had worn the feathered
cloak. They feared standing close beside her, because she had won the enmity of the blood knives.

There came another thin, old man down the path toward her, and she brightened, seeing him and the pair of young mask warriors who walked a few steps behind him.

“Here you are,” said Eldest Uncle as he turned and fell in beside her, matching her pace. He carried nothing except a skin bloated with liquid.

She greeted the young ones with a nod, and they fell back to let their elders speak privately.

“That’s a new mantle,” she observed.

“A fine gift from my daughter, so I am meant to understand.” He folded back the corners of his hip-length mantle so she could admire the short kirtle tied around his hips.

“New cloth, and new sandals, as well.”

“I am well taken care of,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s like feeding a dog so it doesn’t bark untimely.”

She laughed. The baby stirred, and she halted to let him lift the infant out of the sling and fix it to his own scrawny hip. The baby was awake, eager to look at faces and trees, although the wasteland to the north was too jumbled a sight to interest her infant gaze.

They set out again, settling into a swinging pace.

After a time, she said, “You have news.”

“So I do.”

They walked a while, passing another two returning with empty slings, who greeted Eldest Uncle with open smiles and Secha with guarded ones.

“They fear me,” she said.

“It was the custom in the days before that she who challenged for the feathered cloak, and lost, gave herself as an offering to the gods.”

“What of she who was challenged, and lost?”

He shrugged. “Challenges were rare. Usually a vote was called only when the Feather Cloak passed into death and a new one must be chosen. Then a pair of candidates would be picked by the warriors and the blood knives, and set before the baskets. Even so, the outcome was usually determined in advance.”

She snorted. “Then little has changed.”

“You did not fight hard enough, Secha,” chided Eldest Uncle. “Where is that look you used as a child when my daughter bullied the other children? You were younger than her, but wiser in your mind!”

“I am not the right leader, Uncle. Not for this day. Not for this war. It is better that I stepped aside in favor of others.”

He frowned. “Even if they are wrong?”

“Are they wrong? I do not know.”

“Ah!” Such a sound a man might make when he is told that his beloved has left him. “She has persuaded even you with her arguments.”

“No, but I am not persuaded by my own. I am a good magistrate, Uncle. I can judge disputes and oversee labor and distribution. I can see who lies to me and who tells the truth, who seeks selfish favor and who wants to do what they think best for their clan. In exile, I could raise my hands and know that my decisions allowed every person in the tribes a chance to live that could not be stolen from them by another’s greed or anger. That does not make me the right person to stand at the head of an army. That does not make me the right person to raise my hands to the gods now that we have returned home.”

He grunted. The baby babbled and tried to touch his chin, which distracted him for a bit.

She saved her breath for walking, although she had become accustomed to the balance and strain of the load.

After a while, he said, “Feather Cloak wishes me to attend her on a matter of grave importance. I ask you to come with me.”

A pair of mask warriors came striding along toward them, on patrol.

“Uncle!” Almost in unison, the young men touched the tips of their left fingers to their right shoulders. “Any help you need, Uncle? Aunt?”

“We are well,” said Eldest Uncle, and the men touched their shoulders again and continued past at a brisk pace, trading jocular salutes with the warriors who attended Eldest Uncle.

“I feel that I am torn in half,” said Eldest Uncle, glancing after them. “So it was in my youth that we greeted elders in such a manner. How came it that such simple signs of respect failed us in exile?”

“So many died,” she said, “although I do not remember those days myself when corpses filled the streets. Many things were lost that were once treasured.”

The baby fussed a little, and Eldest Uncle bounced her on his hip in time to his stride, to soothe her. “We should not have let it happen.”

“It is past now. We must let go of what we were in exile, and face what we will become.”

His eyes were crinkled with a kind of amusement, but his lips had a set, conservative mood to them. “I fear.”

“What do you fear?”

“I fear that you are right. Secha, will you come with me? I rely on your strong eyes to see what I might miss.”

“I’ll come.” She laughed. “Only I will need attendants to bring along the babies.”

“You don’t ask what matter calls us.”

“That you ask is reason enough.”

The watchtower and its scaffolding came into view atop the steep slope. Here, for many months, Eldest Uncle had made his home. During their exile, he had spent more of his time in a clearing nearby, where the burning stone that marked a gateway between the aether and the world they had lost burned into existence at intervals. What he was waiting for she could never quite fathom. Maybe he had just been waiting to go home.

“Anyway,” she added, “I find I am already tired of hauling rock. I am ready to see what comes next.”

FOR many days they were forced to camp at the edge of a wasteland still steaming from vents and pits, a desolation so complete that no life grew there, not even the tiniest spear of grass or fleck of mottled lichen. Farther away to the southwest the sea sighed and sobbed on an unseen shore, heard mostly at night when the sound of the wind died away. In this direction lay open ground patched with grass and low-lying shrubs that had miraculously escaped the burning.

Here, within a ring of head-sized stones rolled and levered into place by their captors, they were allowed to set up their tents. Water arrived during the night, carried in leather buckets by unseen hands. Lord Hugh rationed their stores carefully, but already they had been forced to slaughter two of the horses and soon—in another ten or so days—they would run out of grain.

Along the southeast boundary of the campsite, a chalky road ran more-or-less west to east. South of the road lay land that appeared magnificently lush to Anna’s eyes, although compared to the fields and woodland around Gent it looked dusty and parched, with dry pine, prickly juniper shrubs, and waxy myrtle, and the ubiquitous layer of pale grasses. It wasn’t lush at all; it only seemed so because they had ridden through a wilderness of rock for so many days that any land untouched by destruction seemed beautiful in comparison. Yet there were tiny yellow flowers blooming on vines growing low to the ground. A spray of cornflowers brightened an open meadow. She hadn’t seen flowers for so long. It was hard to believe it was spring.

“If they haven’t killed us yet,” Hugh was saying to one of the men for the hundredth time, “it is because they are waiting for someone.”

“It was well you knew the secret of their parley language,” said Captain Frigo, “and that talisman name. Otherwise we’d all be dead.”

Hugh nodded thoughtfully. “Never scorn any mine of information,
Captain. What seems crude rock may turn out to have gold hidden away in deeper veins. Who would have thought that unfortunate frater would possess such an intimate knowledge of the very noblewoman we are here to negotiate with?”

Their captors remained hidden. Anna wasn’t sure they were even human. They emerged only at night to retrieve the empty water buckets and return them full. They had animal faces, not human ones. But Lord Hugh said those animal faces were actually masks and that behind the masks the Lost Ones looked just like Prince Sanglant, with bronze-colored skin, dark eyes, and proud faces.

Maybe so.

Princess Blessing sat in the middle of the clearing with hands and feet bound. She stared into the foliage day and night, when she wasn’t sleeping. She hadn’t spoken a word for days, but now and again Anna caught her muttering to herself the way clerics and deacons murmured verses as a way to calm their minds.

Late one afternoon, Anna sat beside her and wiped her brow. Grit came off on her fingers. The breeze off the wasteland carried dust, and it had filtered into every crevice of their baggage. No matter how much she combed her hair, or Blessing’s hair, the coarse dust never came out.

A twig snapped.

“Hey!” Theodore, standing sentry, raised his bow with an arrow set to the string. In the forest, humanlike figures scattered into the trees.

Anna scrambled to her feet, staring. This was as close as she had seen any of the masked figures during the day, but already they vanished into the landscape as would animals fleeing from the noise and smell of humankind.

“Hold!” said Hugh. “Be calm, Theodore.”

In the distance, a cry like that of a horn rose and stretched on, and on, before arcing into silence. Within the foliage, green and gold spun into view before disappearing behind a denser copse of pine. Anna placed herself between Blessing and the threat, but the girl pushed at her knees.

“I want to see!” she whispered.

“Put your weapons down,” said Hugh to the soldiers. “They outnumber us. These rocks are too low to create a defensive perimeter. Let us use our best and only shield.”

He crossed to Blessing, took her by the arm, and invited her to stand with a gesture. She looked sideways up at him, glanced back toward the company moving nearer through the forest, then got to her feet with a remarkable show of cooperation. Anna did not trust the stubborn set of the girl’s mouth, but she merely took two steps sideways and kept her own mouth shut, ready for anything, hands in fists.

The foreigners appeared at the bend where the chalk-white road curved away out of sight. The shadow of the trees lay across the wide path. These formidable creatures were after all not cursed with animal heads. A few wore painted masks: a fox-faced woman, a man with the spotted face of a leopardlike cat, a green and scaly lizard. There were also a half dozen who possessed no mask. One of them was a man so old and wizened that he might have seen a hundred years pass. He wore only a short cape, a kirtle, and sandals. A younger woman, scarcely better clothed, stood beside him with a hand cupped unobtrusively under his elbow. Other figures sheltered within the trees, half concealed. Anna thought she heard a baby’s belch, but if there was a baby, it remained hidden.

A man strode at the front rank whose proud, arrogant features reminded Anna forcibly of Prince Sanglant, although he had a cold gaze that made her nervous. He surveyed the humans in the same manner that a handsome cat examines a nest of helpless baby mice it has just uncovered.

Yet even he could not match the woman who led them. She was short, sturdy without being either fat or slender: sleek and well fed, a leopard stalking in lush hunting grounds. Her hair was lighter than that of her kinfolk although her complexion was the same: bronzed, almost gleaming. She wore a startling cloak sewn entirely of brilliant feathers. A pair of young people behind her carried a huge golden wheel trimmed with bright green feathers. It was this wheel Anna had
seen whirling and flashing in the trees. The richness of its gold stunned Anna. Indeed, every one of the folk facing them wore gold necklaces and gold-beaded armbands and wristlets and anklets and thin gold plates shaped to cover the breastbone, as rich as noble princes arrayed for a court feast. Yet their dress was that of barbarians, plain linen kirtles cut above the knee, feathered and beaded guards on arms and legs. Some of the men, like the old one, wore little more than a white breech-clout, the kind such as farmers and fishermen donned in the heat of the summer while out working in marshland and mud. All wore short capes.

There was silence as the foreigners came to a halt on the other side of the rock corral and the two groups examined each other. Hugh moved first, tugging Blessing forward.

“I seek the one known as Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari. This is her granddaughter.”

The fox-masked woman barked words Anna could not understand. Half the company laughed. The old man frowned. The woman in the feathered cloak raised a hand to silence them, but she appeared neither pleased nor offended.

Still, no one replied, so Hugh went on.

“This is the child of Prince Sanglant, your kinsman. I am called Hugh, born of Austra, named lord and presbyter by the right of my noble lineage and God’s blessing. I claim right of speech with your leader.”

“I speak,” said the one wearing the feathered cloak. She spoke in comprehensible Wendish, tinged with a Salian flavor. “Few among humankind know the name of Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari. So I told the scouts, who came to me and reported that a group of warriors led by a man with hair the color of sun had come to our border and asked to speak to the woman who chose that name. The priests wish to see you all brought at once for sacrifice. But I said differently. I told them, better to hear what the one with hair the color of sun has to say and kill him after, than to kill him first and never hear his words.”

“Indeed,” agreed Hugh affably. “It is foolish to throw away perfectly good knowledge out of spite.”