The Gathering Storm

by Kate Elliott

  “We know of a plant that will soothe the wound. Rest. Listen to the Old Ones. We will bring nourishment, and brackweed for healing.”

  “So be it,” she said.

  Mosquito rolled sideways, got most of the way into the water, then vanished, with a heave of his tail. Water boiled up to her toes before subsiding across the uneven floor. He was gone. Gnat remained, silent and watchful.

  She stretched full length against the earth and laid a cheek against the ground. The surface abraded her skin. For a long time she remained there with eyes open, just breathing, emptying her mind, trying not to remember the battle. Or Sanglant. Or Blessing. Or Hanna. Or Da. Or the fire daimones.

  Let. It. Go.

  She shut her eyes.

  Hers was not a nature that took easily or eagerly to earth. Earth buried fire. Earth cast on flames choked them. But with each breath she let her awareness sink into the earth, and she remembered those slow voices that had spoken to her in her dream. How long ago was it? How far must she travel? How deep must she go?

  Stone was only a blanket covering the deeps of the Earth where fire flowed in vast rivers hotter than any forge. The Earth churns around a dragon’s heart of fire and a cold, heavy mass at its innermost core.

  Listen. Swift. Daughter. Listen. The. Storm. Is. Coming. The. Earth. Will. Crack. To. Pieces. If. We. Do. Not. Aid. Her. Make. Room. Make. Room. Will. You. Help. Or. Hinder. Speak. Daughter. Can. You. Hear. Us.

  The fires within the Earth were a conduit linking her to the Old Ones who spoke through the earth, who were part of the earth and yet apart from the earth, slow as ages yet with the sharp intellect of humankind and the powerful dreams of creatures long since vanished from Earth who were called dragons, children of fire and earth.

  “We must stop the weaving.” Her whisper carried on the thread of liquid fire deep into the earth and away, into the web that wove all things together.

  No. No. So. We. Thought. First. But. Now. We. Know. Better. This. We. Have. Learned. From. The. Fallen. One. The. Weaving. Must. Open. To. Allow. The. Song. Of. Power. The. Resonance. Between. Land. And. Land. Make. Room. Or.

  They had no words for what came next. It was an explosion of images beyond anything she had ever seen, beyond even the destruction wrought by Adica and her companions twenty-seven hundred years before. A scorching rain would blast the countryside; the earth itself would buckle and heave, spilling forth rivers of fire to drown land and sea alike. All creatures, dead. All life, obliterated.

  “What of the Ashioi? Are they doomed?”

  Make. Room.

  Open the weaving to make room, to soften the blow, but close it before Anne could cast the Ashioi land away again.

  “How?” she whispered as hope bloomed in her heart because now she recognized where she was. She knew how the threads connected them. She lay directly below the central crown. She lay buried in the earth, and they called to her through the ancient resonance that linked all the crowns each to the others. What they spoke of made a sudden, awful sense. She had to trust that they were her allies. She had no other choice, not anymore.

  “How can we do this?” she asked.

  They told her.

  4

  THEY bound him to the wagon’s bed with chains that rubbed his ankles and wrists raw. Each jolt as the cart hit ridges and ruts in the road slammed him into the railing until his hip and torso bruised all along that side. Splinters stung in his bare arms, but he hadn’t enough give in the chain to be able to raise his hands to pick them out. When it rained, he got soaked; the sun burned him where no clouds protected him from its glare.

  It was still a merciful existence because, slowly, over days or weeks, the rivers of blood receded from his sight. He was weak, and so dizzy more often than not that he could barely stand. He had long since forgotten what was real and what was hallucination: a hamlet might rumble into sight and children might throw rotting fruit at him, laughing and screaming, the two sounds too close to untangle because of the desperation ringing in their voices, and yet as he stared trying to make sense of the scene or wincing at the impact as a wormy apple struck him full in the abdomen, a flood would crash down drowning the huts and casting beams and thatching into foaming waves like kindling, but if he blinked, he might be staring at forest again or at the sea, for it often seemed he stood at the stem of a dragon ship with oars beating away at the waters and the wind blustering in his bone-white hair.

  “Who are you?” cried the guardsmen who attended him as they jerked the wagon to a halt on the commons and folk ventured in from the fields or out from their workshops and cottages to see what their lord had brought ‘round on procession. “What’s your name, noble lord?”

  The words smirched him no less than the rotten fruit, but he could not answer their questions or defend himself. If he spoke at all, the words that poured from him made his audience laugh, or weep.

  “We’ll never know peace. What is bound to Earth will return to Earth. The suffering isn’t over!”

  “See what a count’s progress this cheat and liar makes now!” called Heric, who had bread every day and a new tunic for his reward as well as the pleasure of accompanying the cage as it made its rounds through villages and farms that at times seemed familiar to him although he could put no name to anything if it were not spoken within his hearing. The only name he remembered was Adica’s. She was dead.

  His only companions were rage and sorrow, invisible but always crouched at his side, and the shackles bound him close against them. He could never escape.

  At least the rivers of blood had stopped flowing.

  “Yet blood will cover us again,” he said to the villagers as he tried to blink away the glare of the sun. He had to make them understand even though there was nothing they could do to save themselves. “The cataclysm is coming. She set it in motion. She didn’t know what she was doing. She did know, but she couldn’t have understood. I loved her. She couldn’t have wished harm on so many.”

  She couldn’t have.

  No matter how many times he said it, he knew he would never know.

  Because of the chains, he could not wipe dust from his eyes. Tears ran constantly as the dirt of the road was kicked up into his face. His tongue tasted of grit. Now and again they gave him porridge poured onto the floorboards of the wagon so he had to kneel and lap it up while curious folk watched and whispered. Once a child threw the end piece of a moldy cheese at him, and he barely caught it and wolfed it down even though it was so hard it was like eating rocks. Even apples rotted to a brown mush inside the soft skin were welcome. He picked the skins off the bed of the wagon where they had splattered. He drank rain, licking it from his hands.

  “He’s no better than a wild beast!” said Heric. “Yet this creature claimed kinship to our noble count! For shame! For shame that any of you once bowed before him!”

  Fear shamed them. He saw right into their hearts. They were afraid of their new lord, the one they called Geoffrey, yet they feared his raving words and filthy appearance even more and so they hated him. He spoke aloud of the terror that slept within each one, songs of despair whose melody was the end of the world.

  They believed him but did not want to. He heard their murmurs as they spoke among themselves of the harbingers that had plagued them for the last few years, ever since the lamentable death of the old count. Troubles beset them with refugees on the road and children starving and holy fire burning their limbs and plague rife in the south, so rumor had it, and the harvest blighted and the storms as fierce as any in living memory with hailstones so large they destroyed houses and lightning that had burned down a church and untimely snows in late spring which caught travelers and householders and shepherds unprepared.

  They believed him, and therefore they cursed him. Lord Geoffrey rode into each village in his wake with his young daughter beside him, and they bowed and genuflected before the young countess and pledged their oaths, because Geoffrey was better than the end of the world.

  �
�No one will escape,” he said to the air.

  “Especially not you!” crowed Heric, and the guardsman called to the carter who controlled the reins. “Here, now, Ulf! Time to move on! We’ve a long way to go today before you and I will get our feast and a longer way to go before the usurper gets his fill of his just reward.”

  The wagon lurched forward as Ulf the carter got the oxen moving. They jounced down a forest path. The leaves of the trees had begun to turn to gold and orange, and as the wind rattled through the branches, leaves spun loose and danced in eddies and spirals. Ahead, Heric called out. The wagon jolted to a stop in a clearing carved out of the woodland where stood half a dozen wattle-and-daub huts roofed with sod. Fences ringed vegetable gardens, each one neatly tended although most looked recently harvested. A stand of rosemary flowered; a few parsnips remained in the ground. A score of ragged folk stared as Heric launched into his tirade and the other guardsmen poked at him with sticks to emphasize Heric’s words.

  “… claimed to be the son of the count, but it was all a lie…. God have punished him … found as a madman roaming the countryside stealing a deacon’s bread and trying to murder a girl … no better than a beast.”

  A woman stepped out of the crowd, holding tightly to the hand of a small child. She was thin and wasted, and the child was not much more than skin stretched over bone, but both had a fierce will shining in their expressions, not easily cowed by Heric and his arrogant companions. Strangely, although she dressed in rags like the rest of the villagers, she wore over all a sumptuous fur-lined cloak more fitting to a lord than a pauper. It was this cloak that gave her authority among the others. It was this cloak that made his eyes burn, and his head reel.

  “We know what you are about,” she said to Heric with the calm contempt of a woman who, having stood at the edge of the Abyss and survived, no longer fears worldly threats. “Leave us, I pray you. Do not mock us by this display. We know who walks among us. We know who he is.”

  Some of them wept, and their compassion silenced him. He did not condemn himself by babbling but only watched as Heric angrily swore at the carter and got the procession moving again down the forest path. The trees closed in around them. The hamlet was lost as if it had never existed, and maybe it hadn’t. Maybe it was just a vision, not real at all. His head hurt. In the distance he heard the rumble of thunder that heralded a gathering storm.

  XXX

  THE NATURE OF THEIR POWER

  1

  “I pray you, Sister Rosvita.”

  Rosvita started awake. “I dozed off,” she said, brushing a fly off her cheek. The warmth of the sun soaked into her back, which ached from lying on the ground. Despite the late date—by her calculations, it was the ninth of Octumbre—the sun glared ungodly hot. Beneath her body the earth trembled. Horses neighed. Dogs barked. As the noise subsided, a stillness sank over them, as taut as a drawn bowstring. There was no wind.

  “That was a little stronger than the others,” said Ruoda, but there was an odd tone in her words, a warning.

  Rosvita sat up. Her little company sat like rabbits caught under the glare of an eagle, all but Mother Obligatia, who lay beneath the shelter of the awning on a pallet. The old abbess was also aware, raised up on one elbow to watch. Hanna stood beside her with her gaze fixed on the five men waiting at the edge of their little encampment, one of whom was the one-eyed general, Lord Alexandros, wearing a handsome scarlet tabard and, under it, a coat of mail. He did not speak. Such an exalted man had servants to speak for him.

  “Sister Rosvita.” Sergeant Bysantius inclined his head respectfully.

  “General Lord Alexandros requests the attendance of the Eagle at his tent.”

  “Very well,” said Rosvita, knowing they had no way to protest if the general chose to drag Hanna off by force. “I will go with her.”

  “Those are not our orders, Sister.”

  “I pray you, Lord Alexandros.” Rosvita turned her attention to the general. “She is under my protection.”

  “I know what he wants,” murmured Hanna, who had gone ashy pale. “It’s my hair. These eastern men are obsessed with pale hair.”

  “I can’t let you go, Hanna! I’ll let no man abuse you. I am not so weak or cowardly.”

  “Nay, Sister.” Hanna moved up to take her hand and whispered into her ear. “I am not without weapons of my own, although you cannot see them. Let me go. Better if I go now. We may need to rebel on a different day than this.”

  “Soon,” Rosvita agreed, but such a tight fist clenched in her chest that she despaired. Soon the world would alter, and they were prisoners and helpless to combat it.

  “We must survive,” murmured Hanna. “That is all we can hope to do. If I do not come back, do not despair. If I can escape, I will.”

  “Go with my blessing, Daughter.” Rosvita kissed her on either cheek, then on her forehead, and wiped away tears as the Eagle left the circle of rope and went with the general and his escort. Hanna did not look back, but Fortunatus went right up to the rope and gripped it in his hands, staring after her. Rosvita joined him there.

  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.”

  2

  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.