The Gathering Storm (127 page)

The day was so hot. “This is not natural heat,” she said. The guards glanced at her, but since they could not understand Wendish, the conversation did not capture their attention. “I feel all the Earth holds its breath.”

Another rumble danced through the ground and faded so swiftly that it might have been no more than a fly buzzing at her ear. No clouds softened the hard blue sky. The sun dazzled over the ranks of white tents arrayed in neat columns. They had settled into this campsite four days ago and not moved,
and she did not know why, although she suspected that over the last weeks they had marched well into Dalmiakan territory and now waited close to the sea.

They camped on the slope of hills that crumpled up the ground to the north and west, and it seemed likely that the hills rolled flat to become a plain to the southeast, but since they rode in the midst of the army and camped in the midst of the army, it was hard to get a good look. No vista opened before them, only the rugged outline of hills burned to a pale yellow by the autumn heat. The quartermaster’s tent blocked their view to the west. Under the glare of the sun, the camp lay quiet. A man walked between tents hauling two buckets of water from a pole balanced over his shoulders. A dog slunk out from the shade of a tent and trotted, ears flat, after a scent too delicate for her to catch.

Lady Eudokia, too, was waiting. That was why she had ordered her army to leave off marching and set up camp. That catch in their air was the false calm before a storm breaks, the worse for having held steady for three days. Often the noontime sky lightened from blue to a shade nearer white, and on occasion she thought it actually rippled the way tent canvas ripples when wind runs across it. She hadn’t heard a bird for days. Even the bugs had fled.

“I am afraid, Sister,” said Brother Fortunatus.

She put her hand over his, then glanced back at their tiny encampment. The young clerics had fashioned a writing table and took turns copying to her dictation or from the pages of one of their precious books while the rest clustered around watching or offering commentary. Gerwita read aloud to Mother Obligatia in a voice so soft it was inaudible from a stone’s toss away. Teuda and Aurea were washing shifts in a bucket of water, now gray with dust, and chatting companionably as Aurea labored to improve her Dariyan. Petra slept, as she did more often these days.

“A peaceful scene,” said Rosvita. “Deceptively so.”

“What will become of us?”

“I have told Princess Sapientia what I know. If she chooses not to believe me, I can do no more. It is in God’s Hands now.”

IN the general’s tent there was wine as well as sherbert cooled in a bowl of ice crystals, all arranged on an ebony table placed beside a couch covered with green silk. Lord Alexandros indicated that Hanna should sit. At first he sat beside her, taking her hand in his as he examined her emerald ring and fingered her hair, but quickly enough he rose, went to the entrance of the tent, and spoke in a low voice to a person stationed outside.

Hanna ate the sherbert, seeing no reason to let it go to waste. It tasted of melon; it melted on her tongue and sent a shiver through her as she braced herself for what would come next. Besides the table and the couch, the tent was empty. A sumptuous jade-green carpet, embroidered with pale-green Arethousan stars, covered the ground.

A servant—one of the beardless eunuchs—brought in a bowllike brazier glowing with coals and opened up its tripod legs. He arranged sticks in a latticework over the top and, receiving a nod from the general, retreated. The curtains swayed back into place. The general frowned thoughtfully at Hanna, standing with hands clasped behind himself as he surveyed her, his gaze lingering longest on her hair. She waited, holding the empty cup in one hand and the silver spoon in the other. Even a spoon could be used as a weapon, if need be.

He chuckled. The injury to his eye—not visible beneath the patch—had affected his facial muscles; when he smiled, he had crow’s-feet only on the unmarked side of his face.

“I know what you think.” He spoke so softly that she had to listen closely to distinguish words out of his heavily accented Dariyan. “I have a wife. You’re not that pretty.”

She flushed and with an effort did not touch her hair. The curtain lifted; Basil the eunuch entered and held the cloth aside as Lady Eudokia was carried in on a chair by two brawny men adorned with bronze slave collars and wearing only short linen shifts and sandals. An embroidered blanket covered the lady’s legs. The slaves set her down beside the still smoldering brazier. Smoke trailed upward, but the latticework of sticks had not yet caught flame. A spark popped
out of the coals and spun lazily to the carpet. Hanna shifted her knee to grind it out. She couldn’t bear to see a hole burned in such a magnificent rug.

“I understand you can see through fire,” continued Lord Alexandros without greeting the lady. He did not look toward Eudokia, as if he had not noticed her entrance. “The Eagle’s Sight, they call it. Show me.”

Hanna grunted under her breath, both amused and outraged, but she supposed it mattered little. They could not see what she saw unless they had themselves been trained in Eagle’s Sight. As she knelt before the low brazier on its tripod legs, Lady Eudokia cast a handful of crumbled herbs onto the fire and flames blazed up and caught in the sticks. The heat seared Hanna’s face, and she sat back on her heels, but the general had already moved, as quick as a panther, to draw his sword and rest the blade flat across her back.

“If you see nothing,” he said, “then you are no use to me. I will kill you here and now. If you see, I spare you.”

All her breath whooshed out. She set her palms on her knees as she steadied her breathing, however difficult it was with the pressure of the blade along her shoulders and the chill of the threat hanging in the air.
Fear not
. She had survived worse trials than this.

She focused her thoughts and stared into the flame. Whom should she seek? What could she see through fire that would not betray them?

Yet what betrayal remained? Rosvita had told the truth, but Sapientia and her companions had not believed her. Her thoughts skittered. The general loomed over her with his sword held close to her vulnerable neck.

Ai, God, where was Liath?

In the depths there is only shadow, a darkness so opaque that she imagines she smells the wrack of seawater; she imagines she hears the sigh of wavelets lapping on a stony shore. A sound catches her, the scrape of cloth against pebbles as if a limb moves as a person shifts in sleep. Down, and down, she falls, following that sound, until the flame itself becomes one with a river of fire that rages in a tumult, pouring over her
.

She starts back. Iron confines her movement and shoves
her forward again, and she breathes his name, whom she has sought for so long.

Ivar
.

He kneels before a lady crowned with a circle of gold. A gold torque grips her throat. She is tall and sturdily built, a powerful woman with brown hair and the broad hands of a person who rides and does not fear to wield a weapon
.

“Go, then,” says the Lady.

Hanna knows that cool voice well: It is Princess Theophanu. She is seated in a hall with banners hanging from the beams and a crowd of courtiers about her, most of them women. There is another young man with Ivar, but Hanna does not know him. “Take this message and return to my aunt. I am shut up here in Osterburg. My influence ranges no farther afield than Gent and the fields of Saony because I was left as regent without enough troops to maintain my authority. I dare not leave the ancient seat of my family’s power. It may be all we have left. Famine and plague have devastated the south. I have sent into Avaria and the marchlands, but now I hear that they have cast their lot with my bastard brother, and that they, too, have marched to Aosta in pursuit of Henry and the imperial crown! I cannot ride against Sabelia and Conrad. They are stronger than I am.”

“What must Biscop Constance do, Your Highness?” Ivar asked despairingly “She is their prisoner.”

“
She must pray that deliverance comes soon
.”

“So it is true.” Lady Eudokia’s voice jerked Hanna out of the fire, but Lord Alexandros’ sword still pressed against her back. She wasn’t free, and might never be so again. “How much more is true if this is true?”

“Queen Sapientia believes the cleric’s story is not true,” said the general.

“She is easily led. Geza has gained a pliant coursing hound to bend to his will.”

“As long as he keeps to his share of our bargain, we are well served by this alliance.”

Eudokia smiled, and Hanna pretended to stare into the waning flames so they could not guess she understood them. “General, I do not criticize the alliance with the Ungrian barbarians. I only speak the truth. It is the truth we must discover
before we decide whether to attack the usurper and the false skopos or to retreat. The portents speak of an ill tide rising. Does the fire speak the truth? Does it speak only of this day and this hour, or can it see into both past and future? Do we strike now? Or protect ourselves until the worst is over?”

The sword shifting against Hanna’s back betrayed a gesture on his part, which she could not see. She dared not turn her head. Hairs rose on the back of her neck. How easy it would be for him to kill her here where she knelt, yet surely they wouldn’t want to spoil the carpet with her heretic’s blood. She had betrayed the Eagle’s Sight to foreigners. What more did they want of her?

Eudokia fished beneath the blanket covering her legs and drew out a bundle of straight twigs, none longer than a finger. She leaned forward and scattered a dozen onto the dying fire. Flames curled and faltered, then caught with renewed vigor, and the smell that burned off those twigs was a punch so strong that Hanna reeled from it and would have fallen if the general had not closed a hand over her shoulder and wrenched her upright.

“See!” he commanded.

Smoke twined about the licking tongues of fire and dizzied Hanna until her eyes watered and she could no longer tell if she saw true or saw hallucinations brought on by the taste of the smoke.

“
Camphor
will lead her,” said Eudokia, but Hanna was already gone. Her head throbbed and she broke out in a sweat, coughing, while her awareness seemed sharply stimulated. She felt the pile of the carpet through the cloth of her leggings; she heard the rustle of silk as the general changed position behind her; the wasp sting burned in her heart while Lady Eudokia murmured words under her breath, a spell like a snake that drew the smoke into a mirror into whose smooth depths Hanna fell

Holy Mother Anne stands in a circle of seven stones on the edge of a cliff. Through the stone crown she weaves threads of light into a glimmering net reaching far across the lands. Its apex explodes in

the Earth splits and cracks open and a yawning abyss swallows the Middle Sea, and she is choking as a wall of water sweeps inland, drowning all before it

“Enough!” cried Eudokia, voice rising, cracking with fear.

Hanna was flung backward and hit her shoulders and then her head, although the carpet cushioned the blow somewhat. Yet sparks shot from the brazier and spun like fireflies, raining down as the general leaped forward to shove Lady Eudokia’s chair out of the way, chair legs catching in the carpet and dragging it up into stiff folds. An ember ghosted down to light on Hanna’s cheek. No vision, this. It burned into her skin and, with the heavy incense clouding her lungs, she gulped for air, coughed helplessly, and passed out.

“Hanna, I pray you, wake up.”

She fought those hands, knowing that the fingers that closed around her neck would choke the life out of her just as the smoke had.

“Hanna!”

A jolt threw her sideways into a hard wall. After this new pain resolved into an ordinary scrape and bruise, she found herself staring into the grain of rough-hewn wood. She recognized the scrape of wheels and the lurching gait of a wagon. She lay in its bed with the heavens splayed above her almost gauzy, they glared so whitely. Because the sight made her eyes hurt, she looked down. Fortunatus strode alongside, peering down anxiously at her.

“Hanna? Are you awake?”

The taste of the incense still clogged her throat.

“Hanna, what happened?”

Other faces crowded around as they jostled to get a look at her: Ruoda, Heriburg, Gerwita, Jerome and Jehan, the sisters from St. Ekatarina’s, the servant women, all sliding in and out of her vision. Then Rosvita came and the others melted aside so the cleric could walk with one hand upon the wagon. Her gaze on Hanna had such a benign aspect that Hanna gave a sigh of relief, though it hurt to let air whistle from lungs to mouth.

“Let her be, comrades.”

“But what happened?” cried the others, voices tumbling
one on top of the next. “Where are we going in such haste? Why are we traveling back the way we came as though we’re fleeing the Enemy?”

“Can you tell us what happened, Hanna?” Rosvita’s tone was mild but her expression disconcertingly tense. She touched Hanna’s cheek with a finger, flicking at the skin; Hanna winced, feeling the scar where the ember had burned her. “Ah!” murmured Rosvita sadly, as if she had only now realized that Hanna bore a new injury.

“I saw it.” She did not recognize her own voice. The smoke had ruined it. “Fire. Burning. A flood of water as mighty as the sea unleashed.” Tears made her stammer. “T-the end of the world.”

THE company of thirty handpicked soldiers and their charge fled down onto the coastal plain in blistering heat to rejoin the queen’s army, and on the evening of the fifth day they rode into a camp situated near the shore in the hope, perhaps, of catching a breeze off the waters. Yet the tide was far out, exposing rocks and slime, and despite the lowering twilight there was no wind at all, only the heat.

In the center of camp Antonia dismounted from her mule and fixed Adelheid with an exasperated gaze as a servant showed her to a seat under an awning. Adelheid indicated that all but Duke Burchard and her most faithful retainers should depart to give Antonia a few moments to relax in peace.