The Gathering Storm (105 page)

“Let the children show me the entrance. I’ll take Brother Zacharias to carry a lamp and Gerbert to guard the entrance behind me so none follow.”

“You’ll take no others in with you?”

“Have I anything to fear? The bones of the heathen dead have no power over me, Deacon. Nor over you either.”

“Yes, my lord. In truth, my lord, you have the right of it.” But she still looked frightened.

And why not? Zacharias had leisure to reflect as Gerbert
waded into a knee-deep pool of water lying up against a precipice cut into the high face of the earthworks about halfway around the hill from the little village and their camp. A trickle of water had, over the years, eroded the face of the earth away to reveal an entryway, two stones capped by a lintel, once buried, Zacharias supposed, by the tumulus and now half concealed by a curtain of moss. If the children hadn’t explored here, none of the others might ever have noticed. Gerbert hacked away the moss with his sword.

“Come.” Hugh held a lamp aloft as he waded into the water and squeezed through the opening.

The spring sun laid a warm hand across Zacharias’ shoulders, quite in contrast to the freezing water that iced his toes and calves as soon as he followed Hugh into the narrow tunnel, which was just higher than his head and quite dark. His hand shook, causing the light from his lamp to tremble as it illuminated stone walls incised with spirals and lozenges. He was afraid of the dark, but Hugh frightened him more. The corridor widened enough that a man might slosh through the knee-high water without scraping his shoulders on either wall.

“What’s this?” murmured Hugh.

Zacharias almost ran into a queer scaffolding that, twisting out of the water, was filthy with pale worms which after a moment he recognized as the remains of rotting feathers.

He retched, struck so hard by memory that he emptied his stomach into the water before he could stop himself.

“I pray you,” said Hugh, stepping sideways to avoid the stink, “what is wrong, Zacharias?”

He couldn’t answer.

“Ah.” Hugh groped in the water and fished up a skull patched with tufts of black hair. “I take it these are the infamous wings of a Quman warrior, and this, I suppose, his head. He must have crawled in here to die after the battle. This certainly is no ancient queen laid to rest by her devout servants. Come.” If the matter now floating like scum atop the water disgusted him, he gave no sign of it, although it was difficult to interpret his expression in the shifting light and shadow that played across his face as he moved on.

Sweating and anxious, Zacharias waded obediently after. The tunnel floor sloped imperceptibly upward. The water receded
and gave way to a shoreline and grainy earth as they walked cautiously into the darkness. Hugh halted to study the symbols carved into the stone: more spirals and lozenges, and long strips of hatching and even, here and there, dots and lines that looked like a calendar. What if Hugh found another daimone imprisoned here and let it capture Zacharias’ body? He whimpered.

“What was that?” Hugh asked, pausing, then went on.

The tunnel opened into a broad chamber, a black pit made eerie because of the flickering play of their lights over the floor. The walls remained in shadow, and the ceiling lofted so high above them that it, too, was hidden.

“There she lies, poor soul.” Hugh walked a circuit of the chamber, shining his lamp into three alcoves built into the corbeled chamber. Shaking his head, he returned to the stone slab that marked the center of the chamber.

“I had thought I might find Blessing here with her attendants,” he mused, more to himself than to Zacharias. “But perhaps that was a false vision, not a true one. It makes no sense. Why would Sanglant leave his daughter sleeping beneath one of the crowns? Held in safekeeping? Yet I can still find her. Surely that was Liath traveling in the same manner we walk through the crowns. Who was traveling with her? A sorcerer of great power; I felt her power in my bones.” He knelt beside the skeleton laid out on the slab. The dead queen gleamed under the light because the gold that had once decorated her clothing had long ago fallen in among her bones.

“What are these?” Hugh touched a pair of golden antlers that lay on either side of her grinning skull. “Riches! Best we make no mention of this, Zacharias. I see no need to rob the dead. Let her lie in peace.” He leaned forward, still on his knees. “Here, what’s this?”

He reached past her to lift a crude obsidian mirror off the dirt; despite the passage of years, its glossy surface still caught the lamplight and flashed sparks into the concealed depths of the chamber. Where shadows moved.

They walk out of the alcoves, ancient queens whose eyes have the glint of knives
.

Zacharias yelped in terror, stumbled, and dropped to his knees into a clot of rotting garments that crumbled beneath
his hands. His lamp spilled to the floor, guttering as oil leaked onto the dirt.

“Don’t be frightened, Zacharias,” said Hugh kindly as he lifted the mirror and with an expression of amazement and a clever grin directed light along the walls and up at the ceiling by using the mirror to reflect it. “Of course. Of course, What if she was one of the ancient ones, a mathematicus? What if she used a mirror to capture the light of the stars? Why did Anne never think of this?”

The oil spilled over the ground caught fire and blazed up, and by this light Zacharias discovered himself wrist-deep in a heap of decayed clothing and rusted mail, the remains of a leather belt curled under his fingers and turning to dust as he stared. The fading outlines of a black lion exactly like those worn by the King’s Lions rested a hand’s breadth below his weeping eyes.

“Who’s there?” said Hugh sharply, raising his lamp.

A chill breath of air coiled around them and the fires went out.

There are three of them. They are angry at this intrusion, but they are also intrigued by the exceptional beauty of the one who desecrates their tomb. They have not quite yet forgotten the memory of life that sustains their spirit. They have not quite yet forgotten the sweet perfume of the meadow flowers that bloom in the spring
.

Zacharias lost all sense of up and down, and he fell, but only smashed his face into the bundle of clothing that dissolved all at once into nothing until, when he took a coughing, wheezing breath, it was as if he inhaled all the dust of what had once lain there, sucked up into his mouth and lungs.

The blackness chokes him. Salt water bubbles against his eyes and lips, popping in his nostrils. His lungs hurt, but he keeps swimming although the tunnel is entirely drowned. If he goes too far, he will not have enough air in his lungs to swim back, yet what difference does it make? Where else can he go? Without memory, he is dead anyway
.

He is like the skrolin, trapped in a cul-de-sac whose tunnels only take him around in circles. He must go forward to free himself as well as them.

His lungs burn. His head slams into the ceiling, his fingers scrabble against rough walls, and his feet push along rock as he thrusts forward and all at once comes flailing to the surface. He drags himself out into air and lies spewing with his lungs on fire and his eyes stinging and the world hazing to darkness.

Agony slices through his body as a cold hand brushes the top of his head and an icy finger tugs on his ear as if to drag him back into the water
.

He was no longer lying half in and half out of water but rather on the dusty remains of the burial chamber.

A dry voice whispers through his mind. “He has already been claimed.”

Zacharias recognizes them; they are his grandmother’s gods, the young Huntress, bright and sharp, the Bounteous One, and the Old Woman, toothless with age.

“I fear you,” he whimpers, although he cannot truly speak. He says the words in his mind, and they hear him. “You are the gods my grandmother worshiped. She was loyal to you.”

“
The days when we ruled on Earth are long forgotten. Our power has faded.
”

“I remember you!”

“
You remember us. You are our grandson
.”

He weeps, feeling their affectionate touch. Where his tears meld with the dust, the earth speaks to him in a voice as heavy as stone, reaching him through the ancient ones who linger within the tomb
.

Can. You. Hear. Us?. Are. You. The. One. We. Seek? Help. Us.

“I hear you. I will help you. Tell me what to do.” His lips and his mind form the words although the breath that escapes him is little more than a rising and falling of vowel sounds, not real words at all.

The earth replies not with sound but with its voice throbbing up through his head
.

Listen. Wait. You. Are. Not. The. One. We. Seek. But. We. May. Have. Need. Of. You. The. Crown. Can. You. Reach. And. Touch. The. Crown
?

“
I can
.”

Light flared. Hugh cursed.

“Damn it. There must be a hidden opening somewhere, to let in a breeze like that. Zacharias! For God’s sake, man, get up off the floor. Is the lamp ruined? And broken, too.” His shoulders heaved as he sighed. “Well, no matter. I’ll take this mirror. We’ll leave the rest undisturbed.”

With some difficulty because of the pain still cutting through his body, Zacharias pushed himself up to hands and knees and, as Hugh’s light bobbed away down the tunnel, to his feet. He bent to pick up the fallen lamp and such a wave of dizziness and disorientation swept him that he moaned.

Hugh’s lamp stopped. There was silence.

From this distance and angle Zacharias could only see Hugh’s face framed by the wavering light, golden and beautiful and utterly frightening. The presbyter studied him a moment more, then turned his back.

“Come quickly. I’ve no wish to linger. There’s nothing here of interest.”

The ancient queens waited in the shadows, but they did not advance, only watched. He tingled all over, staggered, dizzy. Hurting. Changed.

Hugh had seen and heard nothing. He had allies that Hugh knew nothing of, that Hugh could not combat.

“Zacharias?”

All his life Zacharias had struggled to keep silence, to speak prudently or not at all. All his life he had failed at this task. He had cast away his faith in God, turned his back on the Lord and Lady, on his kinfolk, and on the calling that had taken him into the east and slavery years ago. He had walked as a beggar through the world, starved for sustenance, fearful and cowardly. He had no words, he had lost his tongue, yet he had been changed utterly.

All the fear was gone. Vanished.

“Go, grandson,” the queens whispered as they faded into the tomb. “Return to us when you can.”

He would return. He would sneak back into the tomb somehow, risking Hugh’s wrath. The queens waited for him, and a nameless ally needed his help.

“Zacharias!”

That tone had once had the power to make him choke with
fear. Now he only smiled to himself and, after a last glance around, followed Hugh into the light.

“THE Word is the surest sign of God’s grace,” Sigfrid said to his audience, who were seated on the sloping grass with hoods and shawls pulled up over their heads to protect them from the glare of the afternoon sun. “Only with words can we speak to others and bring them into the light. Is it not true that those who do not believe are, as the blessed Daisan says, ‘the prey of every fear because they know nothing for certain’?”

Several heads nodded. Ermanrich sidled to the left to get into the shade creeping out over the hollow where the community gathered.

“When the elements mingled and were corrupted by darkness, it was the voice of God, the Word of Thought, that separated darkness out from the others and propelled it into the depths where it naturally belongs. Because it was the Word that gave birth to this world, it is our words that give birth to the community of believers on Earth.”

“Tell us the story of the phoenix and the miracle, Brother Sigfrid!” cried one of the novices. “Tell how God restored your tongue!”

The others begged Sigfrid to tell the story yet again, although in the last year and a half he had told it a hundred times. Because Ivar stood at the back of the crowd, he easily slipped away and climbed out of the gentle amphitheater composed by the natural contours of the ground. Here the inhabitants of the cloister assembled on fine days to discuss the Holy Book and the ineffable mystery of God as well as the more tangible acts of humankind which had confined them in this prison.

At times like this, he just felt so unspeakably weary.

The amphitheater stood at the limit of the grounds, which were measured on one side by the rocky ridge that closed off
the northern end of the vale, ringed to the east and west by a straggling line of forest and the steep slopes of hills, and opening to the south on a vista that looked up the vale over the buildings and fields of the cloister to the palisade. He shaded his eyes to peer into the distance. The estate had turned gold, with only a few greens to relieve the pallor. It had been a hot, dry summer, and the crops had suffered because of it. Dust smeared the sky beyond the palisade. Someone was coming, horsemen and perhaps wagons, if he judged the height and density of the cloud correctly.

He left Sigfrid and his listeners and jogged along the track that led past fields of seared wheat and rye and the withering vegetable gardens to the central compound. He trotted past the weaving hall and took advantage of the shady porch fronting the infirmary to cool his head before cutting across the last strip of open ground to reach the main compound.

The audience chamber lay empty, so he crossed it and walked out onto the portico that faced the inner courtyard. The fountain—a playful trio of dancing bears—had long since run dry, and buckets had to be hauled in every day to keep the herb bed and the roses watered. The grave post dedicated to poor Sister Bona had been freshly whitewashed; her ivory Circle dangled from a nail hammered into the wooden post. It had been over one year since her death, and yet the memory of that awful day remained as vivid as if it had happened last week—the first shock of it, like a punch in the belly, transformed into a numb ache.