PROLOGUE (61 page)

"No," she said at last, more to herself than to him, her voice so soft only he and the hounds heard her. She seemed more perplexed than anything. "I can't make myself feel afraid of you."

Poor creature. Did she think she had to be afraid of everyone? "Come," he said gently, showing her the way. "You must be hungry and tired. You will find a place to rest in my father's hall. Nothing will hurt you there."

And with that, she burst into tears.

Nothing will hurt you there.

The young lord made sure she had something to eat and wine to drink before he took her upstairs to his father. She was too bewildered, too confused, and too embarrassed by her sudden storm of weeping on the road beyond Lavas stronghold to know what to say to him, so she kept quiet.

With the count, she felt on surer ground.

"What brings you to my lands, Eagle?" he asked. He did not, of course, ask her to sit down, nor did he ask her name.

"This message I bring to you from King Henry. 'The city of Gent still lies under the hand of the Eika. Its defenders lie dead. The count of that region and her nearest kin are dead as well and her army scattered. The lands all round the city lie as wasteland. It is time to take it back before the Eika can do worse damage. You were rewarded with a son for your honesty before me in Autun, after the Battle of Kassel. But I could not then ride to Gent's aid because of Sabella's treachery, which you once supported. Prove your loyalty to me by taking on this task. Meet me at Gent with an army before Luciasmass at midsummer. If you restore Gent to my sovereignty, with or without my aid, you will receive a just reward as well as my favor.'''

Lavastine smiled slightly. His smile had no warmth in it; neither, like Hugh's, was it cold, merely practical, as at the sight of a good harvest. "Gent," he mused. "Come, come, Alain. Sit down. Don't stand there like a servant."

Mercifully, the hounds had been kenneled, all but two. These padded obediently after the young lord, who sat himself in a fine carved chair to the right of his father. One of the hounds draped itself over the boots of the count. The other yawned mightily and flopped down near one of the three braziers that heated the room. After two months of traveling through the winter countryside, Liath appreciated how very warm it was in this room, as long as you kept out of the drafts. Tapestries smothered the walls. Rugs lay three deep on the floor. She was so warm she wanted to take off her cloak and outer tunic but feared it would look disrespectful.

"Gent," repeated Lavastine. "A long march from these lands. Yet the reward may be a rich one." He glanced up at his captain, who stood with his other intimate servants here and there about the chamber. Liath recognized a soldier when she saw one; like the count, this man had a brisk competency about him and a squared strength to his shoulders that reminded her
—briefly and painfully—of
Sanglant. "How many men-at-arms can we muster after the sowing?"

"I beg your pardon, my lord count," said Liath. Surprised, he looked at her, raised a hand to show she might continue. "King Henry also sends this message. 'From my kin you may ask for aid. Constance, Biscop of Autun and Duchess of Arconia, will provide troops. Rotrudis, Duchess of Saony and Attomar, will provide troops. Liutgard, Duchess of Fesse, will provide troops. I ride the southlands now to gather an army for the coming battle and I will meet you at Gent unless events in the south or east prevent me. Only a strong army can defeat the Eika.''

"Ah," said Lavastine. "Captain, what do you say to this?"

"It is a long march to Gent," said the captain. "I don't rightly know how far, but it lies a good way into Wendish lands, up along the north coast. We heard many stories, at Autun, that the Eika chieftain was an enchanter, that he had brought a hundred ships to Gent together with a thousand Eika savages."

"You were at Gent," said the young lord suddenly.
Alain.
That was his name. He had offered her his name in the way of equals. She could not stop sneaking looks at him. Tall, broad-shouldered but slender, with dark hair and the thinnest down of pale beard on his face so that it almost appeared as if he had not yet grown a beard, he looked nothing like his father. Ai, Lady. He had spoken so gently to her, in the same way one coaxed a wounded animal into shelter.

"You were at Gent?" demanded Lavastine, suddenly interested in her. Before, she had only been, like a parchment letter, a medium through which words reached him.

"I was there at the end."

So
again
she had to tell the whole awful story of the fall of Gent. And yet, telling it at almost every hamlet she had slept at these past two months had softened the pain. Told again and again, it could hardly be otherwise.
"If you pound your head against the wall enough times,"
Da would say with a bitter smile when she was furious with herself for making a mistake,
"it will finally stop hurting."

Lavastine questioned her closely about the lay of the city, the land thereabouts, the approaches from the west, from the north and south, which she knew little about, and from the east, which she had never seen. He asked her about the river, how close the city lay to the river's mouth, how the island on which the city lay was situated, how the bridges gapped the water and in what manner the gates and walls stood in reference to roadway and shoreline.

"This tunnel," he said. "The farmer claimed the cave ended in a wall."

"So he did, my lord count. I have no reason to disbelieve him. It was a miracle that anyone survived or that the tunnel appeared."

"But a tunnel did appear," said Lavastine.

"And you survived," said the young lord, and blushed.

His father glanced sharply at him, frowned, and then played absently with the ears of the hound that lounged at his feet. "Dhuoda," he said to the woman seated to his left, the only other person so honored in the chamber. "Can you be without so many men for another summer's season? If we leave after sowing, I don't know if we can return by harvest."

"Much depends on the weather," she said. "But despite everything, last year's harvest was decent and this winter has been mild. It could be done if you muster after the Feast of St. Sormas . . .
if
you think it worthwhile."

"The king's favor and a just reward." Both he and the noblewoman looked at the young man. "Eagle, where is Lord Geoffrey?"

"Lord Geoffrey remained behind to hunt with the king. He will follow later and will meet you here by the time you muster your troops."

"Was the king so certain I would agree?"

"He said, my lord count, that he would grant you the reward you asked for."

The young Lord had the propensity to blush a fierce red. He did so now. Liath could not imagine why. But at this moment she did not much care about the embarrassments of the nobly born. She only wanted to stand in this room, to shelter in this safe hall, for the rest of her life.

"Tallia!" said Lavastine in the tone of a man who has scented victory. "He will give us Tallia." He stood. "Let it be done. Eagle, you will return to the king to let him know that I hereby pledge to free Gent from the Eika."

HE climbs upward on the old path through a forest of spruce, pine, and birch. Soon the forest fades to birch only and at last even these stunted trees fall away as he emerges onto the fjall, the high plateau, home of the WiseMothers. The wind blows fiercely at this height, whipping his ice-white hair. A rime of frost covers the ground.

The OldMother, who is both his mother and his aunt, sent him here. "Speak to them, restless one," she said. "Their words are wiser than mine."

He finds the youngest of the WiseMothers still on the trail, her great bulk easing upward toward her place with the others. He sees them now in the distance like stout pillars surrounding a hollow burnished to a bright glare by the glittering threads that mark the spawning net of ice-wyrms. But he does not mean to brave the ice-wyrms' venomous sting this day.

Instead he stops beside the youngest of them, who has not yet reached their council ground. Although she passed the knife of decision to his OldMother before his hatching, it has taken her these many years to get as far as a morning's hard walk for him. But she, like her mothers and mothers' mothers before her, grew from that same substance that carves the bones of the earth. She has no reason to move swiftly in the world: She will see many more seasons than he can ever hope to, and long after her bones have hardened completely, her thoughts will still walk the paths of earth until, at last, she departs utterly to the fjall of the heavens.

He kneels before her, brings her in offering nothing durable or hard, only those things made precious by their fragility and transience: a tiny flower once sheltered in the lee of a rock; a lock of downy hair from one of the Soft Ones' infants which just died last night; the remains of an eggshell from Hakonin fjord; the delicate bone of a small bird such as a priest would carve marks into and with its fellows scatter onto stone to read the footprints of the future.

"WiseMother," he says. "Hear my words. Give me an answer to my question." Having spoken, he waits. One must have patience to converse with the WiseMothers and not just because of the ice-wyrms, Her progress up the path is so slow he cannot actually see her forward movement, but were he to come in another week, the lichen-striped boulder that lies beside the tread of her great hooves would be a finger's span behind. In that same way they hear and they speak to a measure of years far longer than his own. Perhaps, indeed, once they are no longer bound to the world of the tribe by the knife, it is actually hard for them to understand the words of their grandsons who speak and move so swiftly and live so short a time, not more than forty circuits of the sun.

Her voice rumbles so low, like the lowest pitch in the distant fall of an avalanche, that he must strain to hear her. "Speak. Child."

"OldMother heard from the southlands. Bloodheart calls an army together, all the RockChildren who will come to him, to campaign against the Soft Ones. If I take such ships as I have gathered and sail south when the wind turns, will I still be in disgrace? Is it better to remain here, risking little, or sail there, risking much?"

The wind blusters along the rocky plateau. Rocks adorn the land, the only ornament needed to make of it a fitting chamber for the wisdom of the eldest Mothers
—
all but the FirstMothers, who vanished long ago. Below, trees shush and murmur, a host of voices in the constant wind. It begins, gently, to snow. With the thaw will come spring rains, and then the way will lie open to sail south.

Her voice resonates even through the earth beneath his knees, though it is faint to his ears. "Let. Be. Your. Guide. That. Which. Appears. First. To. Your. Eyes."

His copper-skinned hand still lies over her rough one. He feels a sharp tingling, like lightning striking nearby, and withdraws his hand at once. The offerings he has laid upon her upturned hand melt and soak into her skin as honey seeps into sodden earth, slowly but inexorably. The audience is over.

He rises obediently. She has answered, so there is no need to walk the rest of the way up the fjall, into the teeth of the wind, to kneel before the others by the hollow where all come to rest in the fullness of time.

He turns his back on the wind and walks down through the sullen green and white of the winter forest. Below the trees he walks through pastureland, the steadings of his brothers and oldest uncles, the pens of their slaves. All this is familiar to his eyes; he has seen it many times before: the sheep and goats huddling in the winter cold, scraping beneath the snow to find fodder; cows crowded into the byres, fenced away from the dogs; the pigs scurrying away to the shelter of trees; the slaves in their miserable pens.

But as he comes up behind his own steading, newly built from sod and timber, he sees a strange procession wind away into the trees. Silent, he follows. It is a small group of slaves, six of them; one carries a tiny bundle wrapped in precious cloth. They are hard to tell apart, but two he can recognize even from a distance: the male named Otto and the female-priest named Ursuline. These two have become like chieftain and OldMother to the other Soft Ones he keeps as slaves; over the winter he has observed their actions among the others, forming them into a tribe, and it interests him. As this interests him.

A clearing lies in the trees. Certain markers of stone, crudely carved, are set upright into the soil. It is a slave place, and he leaves it alone as do all the RockChildren. Slaves have their customs, however useless they may be. Now, he sees what they are about. They have dug a hole in the ground and into the earth they place the body of the infant that died in the night. The female-priest sings in her thin voice while the others weep. He has tasted the tears of the Soft Ones: They are salt, like the ocean waters. Is it possible that their Circle god has taught them something of the true life of the universe? Why else would they cover their dead ones in earth even as they leak water onto the dirt? Is this what they give in offering? He does not know.