The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  She began to weep quietly, unable to go on in the face of overwhelming grief. Hilaria dabbed cooling water on her forehead, murmuring words of comfort.

  Rosvita burned. Shame afflicted her, to witness this woman’s sorrow and yet exult in it. She was so close. In her heart, in her bones, she understood that she had suffered in the dungeon, risked everything, to arrive at this moment.

  “She saved our lives. Yet I knew her. I knew her.” Obligatia pushed the damp cloth away from her forehead. “I pray you, Hilaria. I will not die in this hour.” By the set line of her frail jaw and the stubborn and fixed nature of her gaze, Rosvita saw it was this memory that had kept her alive for so long. She had recovered the strength of her voice; she had mastered her sadness, as must all those who live to a great age, for otherwise they would have died of grief long ago.

  “I saw her, Sister Rosvita. I saw Bernard’s child. I saw him in her face. I do not know what she is, where she came from, or where she went. Can you explain what happened?”

  The others had gathered close by to listen, struck dumb, it seemed, by the intensity of Obligatia’s testimony and her question.

  But not every one of them.

  “You saw Liath.” The Eagle pressed forward to stand beside Rosvita, towering there with her robust figure and her pale, northern coloring, her hair as colorless as snow. “I’ve seen her, too, these past two or three years, glimpses of her but nothing more than that. She had wings of flame. I thought they were visions, hallucinations. But now I have to believe that what Prince Sanglant said is true. She was taken away, up into the heavens, by fiery daimones.”

  “I do not forget how we heard her voice manifest out of a whirlpool of air,” said Fortunatus grimly. “That day when Prince Sanglant returned to the king’s progress. That day when we saw that he had allowed his daughter to be suckled by a daimone.”

  “When did that happen?” Hanna demanded of Fortunatus.

  “Before he rode east. Before you met up with him.”

  “Yes,” she agreed thoughtfully. “That would make sense. It would fit with what you and Sister Rosvita have told me of your own history, and conclusions.”

  “Liath is Anne’s daughter,” Rosvita said, as if hitting the nail hard enough would drive it into impenetrable rock. “How can she be the daughter of Anne, yet look like Bernard, if the story Prince Sanglant told us is true? If only one of her parents is human?”

  “It could be true if Holy Mother Anne is the one who is lying,” said Hanna.

  For a moment there was silence, except for the wheeze, and Gerwita’s sniffling, and Ruoda’s cough.

  If the Holy Mother were lying.

  Hanna went on, her tone like ice. “Why shouldn’t she lie? If she needed Liath, and everyone who knew her, to believe that Liath was descended from Emperor Taillefer? I knew Bernard. He loved his daughter. And they looked alike. Even though she was burned brown on her skin, any fool could see they were father and daughter, just as a puppy or foal may bear the markings of its sire.”

  “My grandchild,” murmured Obligatia. “Can it be true? Bernard had a daughter? Can it be true?” How cruel the look of hope on her face. “Does he live still, my son?”

  Hanna knelt beside the pallet. She was not a beautiful woman, more strong than handsome, yet her expression became so suffused with compassion that it shone from her in the manner of all true beauty, born of the inner heart and not the outer seeming. “I am sorry, Mother. He died years ago trying to save his daughter from those who pursued her. I saw his dead body.”

  “My son.” The words trailed into nothing, but Obligatia did not weep. Perhaps she had no more strength for weeping.

  “He was a good man, with no more frailties than any one of us suffer, and many virtues. He helped others until there was nothing left for himself. But he feared those who sought to find him and Liath. He did the best he could. He loved her.”

  Schwoo schwaa schwoo schwaa.

  Had they fallen under a spell? To Rosvita, it seemed they had. No one moved or spoke.

  Only Mother Obligatia was strong enough to break that spell. She had survived too long to be overmastered.

  “Why does my daughter wish to kill me, Sister Rosvita?”

  Rosvita glanced at Fortunatus, at Hanna, but they only shook their heads. “I do not know. I can only guess. She has not given up. A presbyter of noble birth waits below the rock. Tomorrow at dawn he will send soldiers up the north face to capture us.”

  “He cannot reach us here.”

  “How can we sustain ourselves, trapped within the stone with no source of food or drink? How have you survived these past two years?”

  “Where is Teuda?” Obligatia asked.

  “She is coming, Mother,” replied Hilaria. “She has seen to the prisoner, and gathered enough bread for everyone.”

  “Help me stand,” said Obligatia.

  With both Rosvita and Hilaria to support her, the old abbess was able to rise. She insisted on being helped to the bench, although the effort clearly taxed her. Sister Petra, still squeezing her hands anxiously and murmuring in an undertone, fell silent when Obligatia patted her soothingly on the arm as one might a nervous hound.

  “Sister Petra has not been well since that awful day,” said Obligatia without apparent irony, considering her own weakened condition. Yet her expression had such clarity and strength of will that Rosvita could not help but contrast the old woman’s energy and evident sanity with the bewildered gaze of Petra as she stared at the shadows, mouth moving but no words coming out. “Sister Carita died soon after we fled here, may her spirit rest at peace in the Chamber of Light. Hilaria, Diocletia, and Teuda have remained rocks.”

  “God granted us strength,” said Diocletia, who had risen in order to give Obligatia room to sit on the bench. “We serve you as faithfully in this life as we will serve God in the next, Mother.”

  Obligatia bowed her head, aware of the burden of their loyalty. Rosvita, looking up, saw her own dear companions gazing at her with that same dreadful and wonderful steadfastness. Like Lavastine’s hounds, they had chosen with their hearts and now could never be swayed.

  “Pray God we are worthy of their loyalty,” she murmured to herself, but Obligatia’s hearing had not suffered.

  “Amen,” the old woman whispered. She braced her hands on the table and with an effort pushed herself up to stand as Rosvita hurried to steady her with a hand under her elbow. “In this way I maintain my strength. My task on this Earth is not finished. I have a few more things left to do.”

  “Here is Teuda.” Diocletia hurried to a passageway that struck into the rock opposite the tunnel through which they had entered. She met there the lay sister whom Rosvita recalled as a gardener. Teuda carried a large clay pitcher filled with water and a basket, which she set on the table. It was filled with white cakes shaped like small loafs of bread but formed of a substance Rosvita did not recognize. It had no smell. Obligatia led the blessing over drink and food, sat, and indicated that Teuda should pass the bread around. When Rosvita bit into the cake handed to her, she discovered it had no taste as well as no scent, its consistency firm but not hard, with some give when you pressed on it without being spongy.

  “What is it?” asked Hanna, too suspicious to eat.

  “We call it bread,” said Teuda. “Do not turn your nose up at it, my friend. It comes to us as a gift. Without it, we would all have died of starvation months ago.”

  “A gift from whom?” asked Hanna, unappeased. “Sister Hilaria said there are creatures that bide in the earth. Has this something to do with them?”

  As with one thought, Teuda, Hilaria, and Diocletia looked at Mother Obligatia. Only poor Sister Petra did not respond; she nibbled at her cake as might a mouse, glancing up frequently at the shadows as though expecting a cat to spring.

  “I heard a tale once,” said Ruoda, who had been silent for so long because of the grippe that afflicted her, who had struggled to keep moving although she was feverish and ill. “I hea
rd it said that the wealth of the Salian kings comes from a deep mine that strikes far into the earth, where lies a treasure-house of gold. Or iron. No man can suffer the deep shafts and live, so they say. They say that the Salians have made slaves of a kind of creature lower than humankind but above the common beasts, who burrow in the earth and seek silver and gold.”

  Obligatia nodded. “Long ago, creatures carved this labyrinth out of the rock. It runs deep. We have explored only a tiny portion of it. Paloma used to bring rolls of string down and unravel them behind her, so she could find her way back, yet even she discovered merely how much lay beyond our knowledge. What cunning and skill they must have had to construct such a vast network!”

  “Do you mean to say that all this, and more, is not natural? That it was hewn from the rock?”

  “Just as the convent was, yet even there the founding sisters merely expanded on what already existed. This labyrinth is, we believe, but the top layer of the onion. We will never know the truth.”

  Gerwita began to weep again, her nerves stretched so fine that any least brush set them jangling.

  “Pray go on!” said Rosvita. “What mystery lies beneath the rock? Truly, I stand amazed.”

  Eating the bread had restored Obligatia enough that she could sit straighter and sip at the metallic-tasting water Teuda poured into a wooden cup.

  “After the creature that murdered Sister Sindula was killed, we sought out and bound Sister Venia. No need to take her to trial. She was found in the midst of her sin, with Sister Lucida’s corpse and the traces of her sorcery nearby. Yet what could we do? It was obvious we were in danger. If we let her go, she could strike again. She might return to those who sent her and seek additional help. Yet neither could I bring myself to kill her, even to save ourselves. I felt we had no choice but to keep her as a prisoner, with us, so that she might not work her mischief again. Yet if she did not return with a report to those who had sent her, surely they would send others to seek her out. And in time they did. Where could we flee and gain refuge? Whom could we trust? In the end, we retreated. I would not suffer those in my charge to be harmed.”

  “If you had given yourself up to those who sought you, then those in your charge might have continued their lives undisturbed,” said Hanna suddenly. “Did you even consider it?”

  Teuda was a big-boned woman and not as thin as the others; she placed herself before Hanna, fists set on hips and chin thrust out in a challenge. “By what right do you speak to our Holy Mother so disrespectfully?”

  Obligatia smiled. A leopard might smile so, before it gobbled up its unsuspecting prey. “Nay, let her speak. It is a fair question. Why not give myself up to save them?”

  “As if such villains wouldn’t have killed us anyway!”

  “Hush, Teuda. Yet that is indeed the first reason. Why should I believe they would not pinch off all the loose ends, those who knew I existed, who knew my secret. If they would not hesitate to kill me, why hesitate to kill those under my charge? Who will notice if a handful of isolated nuns vanish? Few know of our existence. We matter to no one.”

  “You would matter to Liath, if it were true that you were her grandmother. Ai, God, she has prayed so often for some knowledge of her family….” Hanna trailed off, wise enough to be humble in the face of this woman who had suffered so much and survived despite everything.

  “So you have the other answer. I am selfish, child. If Bernard’s daughter still lives, if there is any hope I might yet clasp her hand in mine, see his dear face in hers, and kiss her as one kinswoman to another, then I will do so.”

  To Rosvita’s surprise, Hanna knelt and bowed her head. “Forgive me, Mother. I have misjudged you.”

  “There is nothing to forgive, child—”

  Gerwita collapsed to her knees and began to sob noisily. “I have sinned!” she cried, words garbled by gusts of weeping. “I have betrayed you! God forgive me.” She gabbed for the eating knife left out on the table after Teuda had cut up the cakes. Fortunatus got hold of her wrist; Hanna leaped forward and pulled the knife from her grasp before she could plunge it into her own abdomen.

  “Flee!” she sobbed hopelessly. “No matter where you hide, he will find you. You cannot imagine his power.”

  The force of her wailing and crying racked her body; she jerked back and forth like a woman trying to expel a demon, and all that soft, placid, neat exterior, the calm, reserved novice, dissolved into a woman torn by pain and guilt.

  For a drawn-out time, measureless, everyone stared at her, too shocked to speak.

  But Rosvita recognized the dismay curling up her toes, into her limbs, suffusing her; it scrabbled at her heart, long-fingered dread, like the rats in the dungeon that never ceased to gnaw even and especially on the living who had become too numbed to feel and too weak to fight back.

  “Hugh,” she said at last.

  Gerwita sobbed, curled up with her body against her thighs and her head hitting the floor repeatedly.

  “Restrain her,” said Rosvita. “Do not let her harm herself.”

  “She betrayed us!” cried Heriburg. “We would have escaped. There had to be some reason they found our trail, despite everything. She betrayed us!”

  “Heriburg! Leave off!”

  Heriburg snapped her mouth shut, but she stepped back to grasp Ruoda’s hand tightly as together the two young women glared furiously at their longtime companion.

  If a look could kill as easily as a dagger—

  Rosvita knelt beside Gerwita. At her touch, Gerwita jerked sideways away from her and wailed and shrieked like a woman mourning the death of her only child.

  “Gerwita! Hush! Listen to me, and grant me silence!”

  It took a space for Gerwita to calm down, to swallow her sobs, to lie still, face hidden, in silence.

  “Look at me.”

  Gerwita lifted her head. She had scraped her forehead on the stone; blood trickled into her eyes.

  “Did you betray us willingly? For money? Preferment? Out of desire?”

  Tears streamed down Gerwita’s round face. At first she seemed unable to speak, but finally she choked out words. “N—nay, Sister Rosvita. I would never betray you willingly, not for anything. B—but he threatened my family. I have a younger brother who is a novice at St. Galle’s, a great honor for our family for we are not of the first rank. He said he feared that harm would come to him, if I did not heed him and aid him. I believed him, Sister. I believed he could harm my brother.”

  “Why did you not come to me with this tale at the time?”

  “B—because you were in the dungeon!” she cried, outraged and furious and humiliated. “How could you have helped me?”

  “What did he want from you in exchange? He can’t have known that an earthquake would strike Darre. He can’t have guessed that it would provide the opportunity for my escape.”

  She hid her face in her hands, ashamed. Rosvita could barely make out her muffled words. “He wanted to know what you knew, how much you knew, about the Holy Mother, Anne. The skopos. I—I told him.” She wept again, choking and coughing on the sobs. “God forgive me. I told him everything.”

  Fortunatus began to chuckle, then laughed outright.

  Outraged, Heriburg slapped him across the face.

  “Child!” Obligatia’s voice rang like a hammer.

  “Nay, nay, give me silence for a moment,” said Rosvita, rising. Fortunatus’ cheek was red, but the slap had not discomposed him; he still smiled with his usual sly irony, fond of finding a friendly joke in the weaknesses of others. “Brother Fortunatus is right. Gerwita, you did not betray me at all. I think, Daughter, that you may have saved my life.”

  “How?” said several of them at once, disbelieving.

  Gerwita was too startled to protest.

  “Why didn’t Hugh have me killed? I saw him murder Villam. I know he is a maleficus, that he used condemned sorcery to imprison King Henry by insinuating a captured daimone—the very one that had been trapped in the stone cr
own at the height of this rock—into the king’s corpus. Why didn’t he kill me? My testimony, which is worth something, I believe, could and would condemn him in front of an ecclesiastical court.”

  Silence from the rest of them, waiting, tense, confused.

  Only Fortunatus understood.

  “Because he means to use me to protect himself against Anne. Holy Mother Anne does not know how much. I know about her past. She does not know that I know the secret of her birth, of her incestuous marriage. That her mother still lives.”

  “Her incestuous marriage—?” Obligatia whispered faintly, slumping.

  “I pray you, Mother. Let me explain later. I think you need not be ashamed of your son’s behavior. Yet think. Hugh knows what I know, because of what Gerwita told him. If I am alive, then he holds a weapon to use against Anne, if need be.”

  “Why would he want to harm the Holy Mother?” asked Aurea.

  “Because he is an ambitious man. That is his weakness, as Fortunatus has seen.”

  “I do not think Presbyter Hugh so simple as to have only one reason for anything he does,” added Fortunatus. “There may be other reasons he has left you alive, Sister Rosvita.”

  Hanna spoke harshly. “Perhaps only to let you know that he holds the power of life and death over you. There are a few creatures in this world who hunger for that kind of power.”

  “So there are,” agreed Rosvita. “But he does not have me yet, and I do not mean for him to capture me at all.”

  She turned to regard Mother Obligatia, who simply nodded, as if she expected the speech that would come next.

  “You must trust me, Mother. Where is your prisoner?”

  “Not far from here, safely interred. She no longer speaks to us, but I think her still sane.”

  “And the creatures from whom you have received your bread—what of them?”

  “They are not ours. Soon after we fled into the depths, we found one wounded, and did our best to heal it. After that, one among their number led us to a spring deep beneath the rock beside which one could harvest this bread—although it is no true bread. On this nourishment we have subsisted.”