PROLOGUE (91 page)

"You'll starve!" Gisela shouted ungraciously after them.

Anna had a sudden instinct that now was the time to leave. She got up, grabbed her bundle, and beckoned to Matthias to do the same. He was so strong now that it was no trouble for him to carry a bundle as well as little Helen, who for all her cheerful smiles and gangling limbs still weighed next to nothing. Perhaps, somehow, Anna thought, she'd given her voice in trade for his crippled leg; it wasn't such a bad exchange.

Helvidius did not follow them. Helen began to cry.

The little girl's cry brought the niece's attention, who walked a short way ahead of them. She halted her group and turned, surveying the children.

"I recognize you," she said. "You were the last to escape from Gent. Come, walk with us." She addressed Matthias. "Perhaps you know Gent well enough to advise me."

"Advise you in what?" Matthias asked cautiously.

"I mean to set up a weaving hall. There are good sheep-farming lands east of the city, so it will be easy enough to trade for wool. And ships have always sailed in and out of Gent, trading to other ports."

Matthias considered. "I could help you," he said at last, "but you'd have to give some kind of employment to my sister, Anna, and let our little one, Helen, free with the other children in the hall." Here he gestured toward the sleeping infant, cradled in swaddling bands and tied to its mother's back.

Anna tugged furiously on Matthias' arm, but he paid no attention to her.

But the niece only smiled. "And yourself, Master Bargainer? No, I recall now: You work in the tannery."

"So I do."

"Very well, then. I think we can make a fair bargain that will benefit each of us. Will you walk with us?" She smiled so winningly at Anna that Anna could not help but smile back. She was certainly a pretty woman, but she had some‍thing more than that inside, a certain iron gleam in her eyes that suggested a woman who would make a way for herself despite what obstacles the world threw into her path.

Matthias glanced, questioningly, at his sister. Anna merely signed a
Yes.

But she could not stop her tears as they walked away from Steleshame. Despite everything, she was sad to leave Master Helvidius and his stories behind.

On the second day as they trudged along the forest road, they heard a song rising from the east.

"//
is good to give thanks to God, Their love endures forever.

When I was in distress I called on the Lady, Her answer was to set me free.

When I rode into battle I called upon the Lord, and though the enemy surrounded me like bees to honey, though they attacked me as fire attacks wood, with the Lord's name I drove them away."

Ahead, travelers hastened to get off the road. Their party did so quickly as well, huddling along the verge. Anna appraised the plants along the forest's edge but what could be gleaned had already been taken, either by the folk ahead of them or by the two armies which had so recently passed this way. She could go farther into the forest while they waited, find berries and mushrooms, but even as she stepped back to do so, a glimmer of color flashed in the trees, and she hesitated as the great procession rounded a corner. The sight of such grandeur stopped her, and she could only stare helplessly with the others.

"Open to me the gates of victory. I will praise God, for They have become my deliverer. It is good to give thanks to God, for Their love endures forever."

Six standards were borne before the main procession. They fluttered sporadically and she caught only glimpses of startling and disturbing creatures embroidered on their rich fabric: a black dragon, a red eagle, a gold lion, a hawk, a horse, and another beast whose fierce profile she did not recognize. Behind them rode a man carrying a silver banner marked with twin black hounds.

Anna had never imagined she might see the king
twice!
The weight of the cavalcade thrummed through the ground and up into the soles of her feet. She gaped in awe as the king himself, attended by his fine noble companions, rode past. Beside the king rode the young lord who had spoken to them at Steleshame. Although the others laughed and spoke joyfully, Lord Alain looked somber
—but at least no harm had come to him. He leaned sideways and for an instant she thought he would see her, but he was only speaking to the thin, dark man beside him.

"Sawn-glawnt!"
breathed Gisela's niece, the phrase more oath than word. She pulled a corner of her scarf up to conceal her face, hiding herself, but Anna did not see see Lord Wichman among the king's attendants. She could make out none but the king and Lord Alain as individuals; they were too many and too bright to her eyes in their fine clothes and rich trappings.

After the king came soldiers, and after them the long train of wagons bumping along the rutted road. She swallowed dirt chipped up by their wheels and shielded her mouth from dust. After the passage of such an army, though, the road beyond was easier to tread and they made good time, coming to Gent in the late afternoon of the fourth day.

It was odd to cross the bridge
into
Gent when she had never crossed it going in the other direction to leave. Once within the walls, Gent had changed so completely from those months when they had lived in hiding that it was as if none of that nightmare had ever happened. Few people walked the streets compared to the many who had once lived here, but already the ring of hammers reverberated off the city walls. Carpenters and masons labored to rebuild; lads hauled away trash. Women washed moldering tapestries or hung yellowing linen and moth-eaten clothes out on lines to air. Children dragged furniture out of abandoned houses while the goats they had been set to watch over foraged in overgrown vegetable plots.

Gent smelled of life, and summer, and the sweat of labor.

They went to the tannery first, but it was deserted as was the nearby armory except for a handful of men sorting through the slag for usable weapons. They complained that the king's forces had looted the armory for spear points and mail and axheads. A few dead Eika dogs lay here and there with flies crawling over them. Their eyes had already been pecked out by the crows.

Matthias found the shed where the slaves had slept, but though he overturned rough pallets and examined every scrap of cloth left behind, he found no trace of Papa Otto. They heard voices outside and hurried out to find Gisela's niece talking to an ill-kempt man with the telltale stains of leatherwork on his fingers.

"I suppose some of the dead householders may have kin who'll come to claim an inheritance," he was saying to her. "Ach, but who's to say if they're telling the truth? Or if anything can be known about what was left behind?"

"That's why I thought it worth the risk," she replied, eyeing him with interest. Through the dirt Anna saw he was a young man, broad through the shoulders and without the dreary hopeless expression she had seen in so many of the slaves. "I can take a house here in town without worrying I'll be thrown out for my pains. I saw how few escaped from Gent. Ah." She saw Matthias and Anna and beckoned them over. Helen clung to Anna's skirts and sucked on her dirty little finger. "These are the children I spoke of."

He clucked his tongue and made an almost comical expression of amazement. "You hid here, in this tannery? Ach, now there's a miracle that you survived and escaped. There were very few of us here at the end..."

"You worked here?" demanded Matthias. "As a slave to the Eika?"

The man spit. "So I did. Savages. I hid when the battle started. The rest of them fled, I suppose. But I've nothing to go back to." He glanced at Gisela's niece and shifted his shoulders somewhat self-consciously under his threadbare and dirt-stained tunic. "I thought I'd start fresh, here, at the tannery. So, lad, you know the craft?"

"Did you ever
—" Matthias stammered while Anna
pinched him to make him go on. "Did you know of a slave named Otto?"

"Nay, child, I never heard of such a one, but I only came recently. That's why I lived."

Matthias sighed and picked Helen up, hugging the little girl tightly against him as he hid his tears against her grimy shift.

But Anna only set her mouth firmly, determined not to lose hope. That didn't mean that Papa Otto was dead. He might have fled, he might have been taken elsewhere...

"Come now," said Gisela's niece briskly. "You knew it was a slim hope to find him, poor man. But we'd best be moving on." Here she glanced at their new acquaintance. "Though we'll be back with Matthias. He's a good worker, and very clever. But there's so many folk coming back. We'd best stake out a claim before the best workshops are taken."

Just behind the mayor's palace, abreast of the old open market-place, they found a good-sized workshop with a sizable courtyard, a well, and access to the main avenue. Here the servingwomen began to sweep and wash out the interior while the servingman went to haul mud and lime to patch the walls. Anna drew water up from the well and filled the big dye vat while Gisela's niece ventured out to see what kinds of pots and utensils she could scrounge from the palace kitchens.

"Come on," said Matthias into Anna's ear. He had been raking the courtyard with a rake unearthed from a jumble of forgotten and rusty implements, but he now set down the rake and tugged on her sleeve. "I just want to go see if the daimone is still there, or if we can find the tunnel. We'll come right back."

She thought about it. Everyone else was busy. No one would miss them, and what was it to the others, anyway, if they went to the cathedral to pray for the soul of Papa Otto, who had saved their lives?

It was a short walk to the cathedral, much quicker than the roundabout way they had taken months ago, that night when they had fled Gent. Now they could mount the stone steps in daylight. The long twilight lent a hazy glamour to the scene. The cathedral tower draped its blunt, elongated shadow sidewise over the steps as they climbed to the great doors. Beside the doors lay a heap of fresh garbage and when they ventured cautiously inside, they saw two deacons patiently sweeping away the litter that had made of the nave a kind of forest floor of loam and debris. Of the daimone there was no sign, and it was too dark to go down into the crypt. Anna discovered she didn't want to go at all, and Helen began to snivel, faced with the gaping black stairwell.

"Maybe it's for the best," muttered Matthias. "Come, let's go back. Hey, there!" Helen, having backed away from the crypt door, now ran outside, and Anna and Matthias ran after her only to find her pawing through a gauzy cloud of down feathers that had surfaced in one of the piles of debris.

"She'll take some teaching, poor thing," said Matthias. "You may be mute, Anna, but at least you have your full kettle of wits. I fear our Helen does not." He scooped her up and started down the steps while the little girl crowed an incoherent protest.

Something rested within the downy bundle. Anna nudged it with her toe and all at once the bundle of feathers tipped, rolled, and spilled open. A hairless creature the size of her hand plopped onto a lower step.

It was not a rat, not even a malformed rat. It lay there, the kind of dead white of things that never warm under the sun's touch, its grotesque little limbs splayed in all directions. It didn't have recognizable eyes, only nubs where eyes had tried to grow.

But at least it was dead.

Sun and shadow shifted and the rich golden glow of the westering sun touched the ghastly little corpse.

It shuddered. Stirred. Curled. And came to life.

Anna shrieked.

As if the sound startled it or gave it impetus, it darted away. She blinked and in that instant lost sight of it.

Matthias turned, ten steps down, and looked up at her. Helen quieted in his arms. "What is it, Anna?"

But she couldn't speak to tell him.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

I have, to say the least, taken liberties with history as we know it
—but then again that's half the fun of fantasy. However, I'd like here to. acknowledge a very few of the sources, without which the landscape of
Crown of Stars
would be much poorer.

APPENDEX

Passages quoted or adapted from the Bible have been taken from
The New English Bible
(Oxford University Press, ). Some of the sayings of the blessed Daisan have been taken from the New Testament, others from
The Book of the Laws of Countries: Dialogue on Fate of Bardaisan of Edessa
(Van Gorcum & Co., ), translated by H. J. W. Drijvers. In addition, Drijvers'
Bardaisan of Edessa
(Van Gorcum & Co., ) has been of immeasurable aid in my construction of the church of the Unities.