The Gathering Storm (88 page)

The text was hedged round with prologues and appendices, legal wordings that had to do with humankind’s propensity for complicating matters best left simple. At last Brother Severus laid the parchment open on a board and held it out for his mark. He wet his fingers in the blood of the young queen and drew two slashes beneath the neat letters, none of which he could read.

That would have to change. If he meant to treat with humankind, he must be sure they were not tricking him through his ignorance. “It is done,” said Severus with satisfaction. “We will continue with our reconstruction as soon as you provide us with laborers—” Even a man of such self-control flinched when he surveyed the bloody corpses, the ruin of the battle, the restless dogs. “When the island is habitable again.”

“Just so,” agreed Stronghand.

He lifted his standard again, the gesture that brought quiet over his troops even to the limit of the islands. When he
spoke, he spoke in the tongue of the RockChildren that few humans bothered to learn. “Here we begin.”

He stared over the fens toward the horizon. The last wisps of fog dissipated under the sun’s cold light and a bracing north wind off the distant sea. It had not taken so long, after all, to destroy the Alban queendom: a few seasons, one long campaign.

“Once, in the old days, the chieftains of our people would have plundered Alba and sailed home to celebrate their prowess, gaining nothing more than gold and trinkets. We have walked all of our lives in the old ways. But there is more to gain here than treasure. We need not be content with plunder alone. I say now, let us follow the old ways no longer.”

His army waited. They had learned that it was worth their while to find out what came next. Severus and his retinue backed up as Stronghand paced forward; not one among them did not look uncomfortable as they glanced around and, perhaps belatedly, realized the size and power of the people to whom they had just allied themselves. A hundred-score warriors here on this island and countless more spread across Alba or waiting their turn in the land of their birth, which the humans called Eikaland. For the humans would name each thing, because names were power.

“There is something every human possesses that all but the greatest among us do not. It is a thing few have thought to ask for, and many have feared to obtain.” In OldMother’s hall, in a darkness dense with the scent of soil and rock, root and worm, the perfume that marks the bones of the earth, he had suffered her judgment and heard her words. He repeated them now, thrown as a challenge. “Who are you?”

They watched and they waited, Rikin and Hakonin, Isa and Vitningsey, Jatharin, what remained of Moerin, and many more, hands shifting on axes and spears, feet nudging aside corpses so that they might shift to get a better view.

“By what name will you be called when the measure of the tribe is danced? When the life of the grass is sung, which dies each winter? When the life of the void is sung, which lives eternal?”

“It’s wrong!” cried Jatharin’s chief, speaking for the first
time. “You cast disrespect on the OldMothers, who alone can judge whether a son is worthy of a name!”

“Perhaps. But perhaps they are only waiting for us to take this thing for ourselves which up until now we have feared. We know each one of us his place in the litter from which we sprang. That place has defined us for long years. Why need it define us any longer? We are young in the world, and we will never grow old. Even the frailest Soft One can hope for a greater span of years than the strongest among us, my brothers.”

He paused to let them survey the bodies strewn across the ground, to let them examine the dozen clerics clustered around Severus. The loose robes worn by the circle priests could not disguise the weakness of their bodies—or the sharpness of their minds, honed by learning and the ability to plan and plot.

“Why do we wait? Why should each one among us not possess a name? Why should each one among us not hope to be named in the dance that is the measure of each tribe? Why should each one among us
not
seek to be named in the chronicles of the Soft Ones? Let them know the names of the ones they fear.”

He bared his teeth. He lifted his standard a little higher.

“Who is bold enough?”

Silence followed, dense and suffocating. It was one thing to follow the road of war and another to go against oldest custom, all the measure of safety they knew in their brief lives ruled by the OldMothers and the chieftains, strongest among them.

Tenth Son took a step forward. “I will be known. I want a name.”

“By what name will we call you, Brother?”

“Trueheart.”

Others called out then so swiftly that Stronghand knew some among the RockChildren had brooded over this question. “Fellstroke!”

“Sharpspear.”

“Longnose!”

“Ha! A good name for you, Brother!” cried Hakonin’s First Son. “I will be called Quickdeath.”

Some tapped their chests with a fist, claiming the name, while others merely spoke the word as if that were claim enough.

Many more remained silent, yet as the names were spoken, no one dared to object, not even Jatharin.

When the last namers fell quiet, he nodded and struck the haft of his standard three times on the ground.

“Alba belongs to the RockChildren whom humankind calls ‘Eika.’ We have work yet to do here in Alba to consolidate what is now ours, but we will not stop here. I turn my gaze east and I see Salia at war with itself, brother fighting brother. Where brothers fight, the land is weakened. So we know from our own struggles. That is why we were weak for so long.”

The fen waters gleamed under the sun’s hard light, a cold spring day so clear that he could distinguish each separate reed stalk out where beds of reeds grew thickly around hummocks of land. A body floated in the water, the cloth of the tunic billowing as ripples captured it. North lay the wash and the sea, with no one to hinder their journey. Geese flew high overhead. One of the clerics whispered to Brother Severus, but the old man shook his head impatiently, cautioning the nervous one to hold still. Their allies were anxious, as they should be.

His army waited, restless as the geese, ready to be on the move again, to fight the next battle, but the discipline he had honed in them held fast. Even the dogs sat obediently, licking their bloody muzzles and paws.

They were ready.

“We are weak no longer,” he cried. “From this island we will launch a new ship, and we will call it Empire.”

PART THREE

CAUDA DRACONIS

THE ship lay at anchor beneath a cliff so high and sheer that it looked as if a giant had used a knife to slice through the island before carrying half of it away. To their right, the land dropped precipitously in ragged terraces and rock-strewn falls to the sea where it gave out in a curving line of islets and rocky outcrops thrust up to make of their harbor a sheltered bay. The water beneath them was, according to the shipmaster, too deep to sound. Gentle swells rocked the deck. Zacharias found the motion soothing after so many weeks beating before a stiff wind out of the north.

The intensity of the light dazzled him. He shaded his eyes, peering up to a tangle of white houses perched along the top of the high cliff. What a view! It made him dizzy to think of living so high, staring each day out over the brilliant sea.

Marcus stood beside him, hands gripping the rail as he watched a boat work its way between a pair of scrub-crowned islets before heading, true as an arrow flies, toward them. Four men worked the oars of the craft; she carried six passengers, one scarcely larger than a child. When the boat drew alongside, a sailor threw down a rope ladder.

Wolfhere clambered aboard first, together with the Arethousan-speaking sailor who had gone with him to interpret. The old Eagle blew on his hands and examined them with a
frown; the rowing had raised a pair of blisters. Next came a pair of servants, hardy looking souls, a man and a woman dressed simply but in the finest cloth. Below, the childlike figure was lifted into a sling tied around a third servant’s torso, a man with the muscular build of a soldier. In this way, hoisted like a pack, she was brought aboard. Marcus hastened to the rope ladder. He had an odd expression on his face, one Zacharias did not recognize until the cleric clasped the hands of the ancient woman seated in the sling.

“You are looking well, Sister!”

He cared about her.

“Well enough for a woman who survived a shipwreck.” Though she was strikingly foreign in appearance, with black hair and dark skin, her accent sat lightly on her tongue. “Two months on this island has been efficacious for my lungs.”

“I feared for you in Darre.”

“The air in that city would fell the healthiest of bulls. Its stink nearly did me in, but the sea air has revived me.”

Once she had been a beauty, black and lovely. Now her hair gleamed white, and her age-spotted hands trembled, but her gaze remained inquiring and keen. She caught Zacharias’ eye and nodded. “Who is this?”

“A discipla,” said Marcus.

“Ah.” Her bland expression made Zacharias twitch nervously. “I will speak to him later.”

The servants unfolded a canvas chair, and as they transferred the old woman into this more comfortable seat, the last two passengers clambered onto the deck: a second female servant and a handsome girl no more than fourteen or sixteen years of age, strongly built and with a complexion darker than that of the Wendish servant’s, but not as dark as the old woman’s.

“Grandmother, I will see that the cabin is made ready for you.” The old woman and Marcus had been speaking in Aostan, which Zacharias could understand better than he could speak, but the girl spoke Wendish.

“Elene, I wish you to acknowledge my comrade, Brother Marcus, of the presbyter’s college. We will travel with him until we reach Qahirah.”

“My lady,” said Marcus with the politesse of a man raised at his ease among the nobility.

“Presbyter Marcus.” She inclined her head as between equals.

Whose child was this, so grand, powerful, and proud? So Wendish, yet with a heathen’s looks?

He dared not ask.

“Will Brother Lupus stay with us, Grandmother?”

“For a time, but his task will lead him down a different road than the one you and I must travel. Now go below and see that all is made comfortable.”

As the sailors lifted several trunks on board, Elene allowed the ship-master to escort her to the tiny cabin in the stern that she would share with her grandmother.

“I did not think you could force a man like that to give up one of his daughters,” said Marcus. At the railing, sailors gathered to haggle with the local boatmen, trading from their personal stores.

“He is my son. He must do as I tell him.”

“And sacrifice one? Is this the one he loved least?”

“No. She is the one he loved most.” A flash of anger straightened Meriam’s frail shoulders. “You make light of a father’s love, Marcus, since you knew nothing of it yourself. My father wept sorely when I was taken to the temple of Astareos to become an acolyte there. That was before I was sent north by the khsháyathiya as a part of the gift to the barbarian king. My son loves both his daughters as a man should. ‘A father’s blood is made weak by sons but strengthened by daughters.’ They are both precious to him, since he will have no more by his beloved Eadgifu, may she rest at peace in God’s light. But he knows his duty to his mother. He gave me what I asked for.”