The Gathering Storm (41 page)

To the ferryman’s disgust, the others crowded over to stand alongside Ivar. The ferry pitched like an ungainly horse, and water spilled onto the boards and seeped away.

“Where do you think the biscop has gone?” Hathumod asked.

“She’s duke of Arconia as well as biscop of Autun,” said Ermanrich. “She’ll have duties elsewhere in the duchy, not just in Autun. When I was a novice at Firsebarg, I saw her one time when she rode by on her progress.”

He glanced at their guards, standing at the opposite railing to make a counterbalance. The ferryman and his assistant pulled mightily, dragging them along while the current did its best to wash them downriver.

“Biscop Constance is a fair-minded noblewoman,” Ermanrich went on more quietly. “I’ve never heard any but a respectful word spoken of her, even where it couldn’t be heard. She’ll be a fair judge.”

“If there can be a fair judge,” muttered Ivar.

“You must trust in God, Ivar,” scolded Sigfrid. “Hasn’t She watched over us all along?”

Baldwin leaned against Ivar, folded a warm hand over one of Ivar’s cold ones, and bent his head close. “Of course she has.” His voice caressed like a gentle kiss. “We’d be dead two or three times over if it wasn’t for God. I’d still be married to Margrave Judith.”

Who had died three years ago. It didn’t seem right, or possible that so much time could have passed. Had Father Ortulfus lied to them as a cruel jest?

“Ivar, what do you think will happen if Biscop Constance isn’t there?” asked Ermanrich expectantly. The others echoed his question: shy Hathumod, frail Sigfrid, even Baldwin, although Baldwin didn’t speak, only batted his gorgeous eyelashes in attractive confusion.

They waited for him to speak. They looked to him for answers. Why on God’s earth did they think
he
had any answers, when he couldn’t even fathom his own heart? Yet they expected him to lead them. They counted on him.

They needed him.

“There!” Baldwin pointed. “Now do you see it?”

Ivar glimpsed a stone tower among trees, lost as the ferry pulled laboriously in to shore. The banner flying from that tower didn’t look like Biscop Constance’s white-and-gold standard.

Before disembarking, Ivar paused to study the flowing river. Had he only dreamed the water nymphs? Certainly he now saw nothing except water streaming past, its melodious song singing in his ears. Their horses were brought, they mounted, and rode on. Where they came out of the trees, Autun rose before them, its main ramparts clambering along a defensible hill and more recent settlements sprawled below the old walls along the river, each ringed by a palisade. The biscop’s palace stood between a timber-and-stone cathedral and the old duke’s tower, a squat watch post built entirely out of stone in the time of the Dariyan Empire. Above these magnificent edifices, on the highest portion of the hill, lay Taillefer’s famous palace and the splendid octagon chapel where his earthly remains were interred in a marble tomb.

The banner flying from the biscop’s palace displayed the green guivre, wings unfolded and red tower gripped in its left talon, that marked the presence of the duke of Arconia.

“Strange,” murmured Prior Ratbold. “Why isn’t the biscop’s banner flying at its side, as it ought to?”

They waited at the main gates while the Autun guards sent for a captain from the citadel, a man called Ulric. He had a grim face and a cynical eye, and orders from his superiors.

“Heretics, is it?” he asked wearily, as if he’d heard this tiresome refrain a hundred times already that day. “Come all the way from Hersford Monastery, have you? Isn’t that in the duchy of Fesse?”

“So it is, Captain,” agreed Ratbold, “but you might recall Father Ortulfus was but recently a member of the biscop’s schola. That’s why he was given the abbacy at Hersford when it fell vacant.”

“Ah, yes, so he was.” Ulric grimaced in much the same way as might a man commanded to eat maggots. “I’ll take these prisoners from you, Prior, and see that they are housed as they deserve. You may return on your way.”

“Without even a night’s shelter and a hot meal for our pains?” Anyone would have been outraged at this insult, and Prior Ratbold was not the most sweet-tempered of men. “I can’t believe we’d be turned away after a journey of four weeks’ time, standing in muck to our ankles and likely snow coming on.” The monks muttered among themselves, shocked by such a breach of the customs of hospitality. “Where are we to stay this night?”

“The ferryman has lodging enough to house you.”

As Ratbold began to protest again, Ulric quite unexpectedly grabbed the prior by his robe and pulled him close. Only Ivar was close enough to overhear the captain’s soft words. “Listen, friend. I’d advise you strongly to turn right round and get on your way before anyone takes notice of who your master is. You’re just lucky it was me on duty this afternoon, or you’d be marching to a nice locked cell at this very moment. Do you understand me?”

“B—b—but—” For once, Prior Ratbold lost his power of speech.

Ulric let him go and watched with narrowed eyes and a bitter frown as Ratbold hurriedly got his party turned around and headed south, away from the city. The captain had the patience of a saint. Only when an orchard and a dip in the road hid their backs from his sight did he turn to regard his prisoners.

“Bring in the heretics,” he said caustically to his guardsmen. “What’s seven more in our lady’s service?”

They were taken to a low room in the barracks loft, the kind of prison that soldiers accused of a crime like petty theft or fist-fighting would be thrown into. Here they languished for four days, measured by the light coming and going in the smoke hole. Food and drink arrived at regular intervals. Their slops bucket was emptied twice a day. They had no fire but plenty of straw for padding and although it was cold enough that Ivar was always shivering, the heat from below made it bearable. In
fact, judging by the noise and activity, there seemed to be an awful lot of soldiers gathered in Autun, as many as if. the king dwelled here. In the dim light they couldn’t tell what was going on. They could only listen and pray.

On the fifth morning the trap was flung open, admitting a roil of smoke and a summons. One by one they climbed down the ladder. The awkwardness of their descent on a rickety ladder made them vulnerable, as did a dozen sour-looking guards waiting below. Impossible to make an escape in these circumstances.

“They’ll need a wash before they’re taken in to see Her Most Excellent Highness.” Captain Ulric paused in front of Baldwin, scratching his beard as he looked the young man up and down. “See that this one is given clean clothes. One of you can trim his hair and beard, but don’t let him or any of his comrades handle the razor.”

“Going for a bonus, Captain?” jested one of the guards, a slender young man with pale hair.

“Shut up, Erkanwulf. I do what I must to protect my position and the men under my command. If I can gain Her Ladyship’s favor, so be it. Now move along.”

“Something doesn’t feel right,” whispered Ermanrich, before getting a hard tap on his behind from the haft of a halberd.

“No talking,” said the one called Erkanwulf. Like his captain, he had a surly expression as though he’d eaten something disagreeable.

Ivar glanced at Gerulf, but the old Lion just shrugged. Something wasn’t right here, but it was impossible to know what it was except for the unusual concentration of soldiers, visible as the prisoners were marched through the barracks, out through the busy courtyard, and over to the famous palace baths.

In these stone halls, built long ago by Dariyan engineers, Emperor Taillefer had held court while luxuriating in the waters. His poets had sung of the curative powers of the baths, and more than one tapestry woven in those times depicted Taillefer at his ease among his courtiers in the baths or reclining at dinner on couches as the ancient Dariyans were said to do. The great emperor had restored the glory of the old Dariyan Empire for a brief and brilliant span.

Yet his Holy Dariyan Empire had collapsed when he had died. No one after him had been strong enough to hold it together.

A pair of elderly women had charge of the baths at this hour. Not even they, crones both, were immune to Baldwin’s staggering beauty, and by the time they were done with him, he looked better than he had in weeks with his hair neatly cut in the style favored by the royal princes and his beard trimmed to show off the handsome line of his jaw. A guard brought him a clean wool tunic, simple in cut and color but more than adequate compared to their travel-stained gear. Even Gerulf whistled admiringly.

“God above,” swore Dedi, as if he couldn’t help himself. “I’m glad my Fridesuenda never got a look at him. She’d have forgotten I ever existed.”

Baldwin looked ready to weep, like a calf just realizing that it’s about to be led off to the slaughterhouse. Ivar set a hand on Baldwin’s shoulder. “Just stick by me.”

“You won’t abandon me, will you, Ivar?”

“Of course not, Baldwin. I’ll never abandon you. Never.”

Baldwin’s bright-eyed gaze made Ivar uncomfortable, and even a little aroused. What had Ivar ever done to deserve Baldwin’s loyalty? Well, a few things, maybe, that he blushed to recall now. Those months they’d spent drinking and carousing and whoring with Prince Ekkehard were not ones he cared to dwell on; it was as if they’d been stricken by a plague of lechery and greed that had burned away anything good in them until they were merely rutting husks. But it hadn’t been all bad. He didn’t regret the intimacy he’d shared with Baldwin, because that at least had arisen from genuine love.

Love
.

Ai, God. Why hadn’t he seen it before, when it had been staring him in the face all along? Baldwin stood there in all his beauty, so delectable that with only a little effort he could have just about any woman, and a few of the men, at his feet with a smile. But it was Ivar he gazed at trustingly, Ivar he clung to, Ivar he followed through thick and thin.

He loves me
.

Captain Ulric arrived and, with a curse, surveyed Baldwin,
Ivar, and the silence that had fallen between them. “Please don’t tell me he can’t get it up for women.”

“He’s a novice, sworn to the church,” retorted Ivar angrily, hastily removing his hand from Baldwin’s shoulder. But he knew a blush flowered in his face. His complexion always betrayed him.

The guards snickered until Ulric shut them up with a curt command. “Move them along. Her Most Excellent Highness doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

From the baths to Taillefer’s palace was a climb up a flight of stairs carved into the rock. A light snow fell, white flakes spinning down to dust rocks and rooftops, but not a single flake touched them because of the walkway built over the stairs so that the emperor could walk to and from his baths without getting rained on. Slender stone pillars supported a timber roof. Each pillar had been carved in the shape of an animal: dragons, griffins, eagles, and guivres accompanied their climb. Once Ivar came abreast of a noble phoenix, but when he paused to touch its painted feathers, Erkanwulf prodded him in the back with the butt of his spear.

“Move along, just as Captain said.”

By chance he had ended up behind Baldwin, and as he climbed he could not take his gaze away from the curl of Baldwin’s hair against the trim of his tunic, or the way glimpses of his neck, still moist from the baths, revealed themselves as Baldwin’s tunic shifted on his shoulders to the rhythm of his climb up the stairs. Did Baldwin really love him? Or was he just the only thing Baldwin had to hold on to?

A gate carved with Dariyan rosettes admitted them to the palace compound. Guards stood watch here, too. They were everywhere; a wasps’ swarm of guards inhabited Autun, all of them agitated and tense. Their party emerged into a courtyard bounded by a stone colonnade on one side and a stout rampart on the other. Opposite, Ivar saw the octagon chapel with its stone buttresses flaring out from each corner. He had once been allowed to pray inside the glorious chapel, kneeling in front of the stone effigy marking Taillefer’s resting place. He remembered that stem and noble visage and, most of all, the precious crown held in carved hands, a gold crown with seven points, each point adorned with a precious gem.

But he scarcely had time to gape at the exterior of the chapel before he was hustled away down the colonnade and into the great hall. In this hall he had tried to intervene in the trial of Liath and Hugh. How miserable his failure had been. He’d got a beating for his trouble, Liath had been excommunicated, and Hugh had been sent south to stand trial before the skopos. No doubt that bastard Hugh had by now charmed his way into the Holy Mother’s good graces. And for all Ivar knew, Liath was dead.

He couldn’t hate a dead woman. Was Hanna dead, too? Tears started up in his eyes as he stared around at the tapestried walls, the high ceiling above, half lost in gloom, and the lamps hung from brackets on every pillar and beam. Those hundred blazing flames threw off enough heat to warm the room.

It was strange to stand here again. He seemed doomed to come to grief in this hall. Baldwin caught his hand and squeezed it, then let go as the others were pushed up beside them.

Three princely chairs sat on the dais. Two were unoccupied. Soldiers, courtiers, servants, and hangers-on chattered casually among themselves as, on the dais, a noble prince sat in judgment. She was a robust, handsome lady of middle years, probably past any hope of bearing children, wearing a gold coronet on her brow and the richly embroidered clothing of a prince who might at any moment ride out to war. Ivar had only time to catch the glint of the gold torque at her neck, signifying her royal blood, before he was prodded forward. A dozen strides brought them to a halt in front of the dais steps. The butt of a spear jabbed Ivar so hard in the back of his knee that he lost his balance. Reflexively, he knelt, dropping hard, just as his companions did around him.

Captain Ulric stepped to one side, the better to display his prisoners. “Another party of heretics brought to the gate, Your Highness.”

“Lord save us,” whispered Gerulf, who was kneeling so closely behind Ivar that one of his knees had ridden uncomfortably up on Ivar’s toes. “What’s that traitor doing sitting in the seat of judgment?”