The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  “He knows them now in any case,” Obligatia said quietly. After a moment, she went on. “Last summer a lone frater begged leave to spend a night in our guest hall. It is unusual for us to receive guests, as you can imagine. If travelers over St. Vitale’s Pass must leave the main road because of rain, then sometimes they will wash up here, but otherwise we live an isolated life. It is what we seek, each for our own reasons.”

  “Yet when guests arrive, it seems according to the testimony of this chronicle that you ask them if they know of any stone crowns.”

  “Few of us are immune to curiosity. So I asked our traveler that question. He called himself Brother Marcus. And then he did a strange thing: He called me by my old name, the one I had given up when I chose life as a nun here. He called me ‘Lavrentia.’ How could he have known that name was once mine, for he was younger than I?”

  “Who knew in any case that you were last seen alive entering this convent?”

  “The Eagle, Wolfhere.”

  “Who may have seen you at the skopos’ palace. Yet there must have been other people in the party that you traveled south with forty years ago.”

  “In all these years, I have seen no other person I recognized. Mother Aurica is long since dead. My nuns know me only as Mother Obligatia. The Eagle is the only link, and it suddenly seemed strange to me that he had made such an effort to remove me from St. Felicity all those years ago. Why would this other man come and ask for me by my old name? What of my secrets did he know?”

  “‘She is back in our hands,’” murmured Rosvita, recalling the scene before the fire high in Julier Pass. “Wolfhere was banished from the court by King Henry years ago. In the time of King Arnulf it was said that he knew more than a man ought. I have myself seen that he can speak through fire. Yet that power is also known as the Eagle’s gift. Did this Brother Marcus give any reason why he wanted to find you?”

  “Nay. But I admit freely, Sister, that I was frightened because I feared the woman who removed me from St. Thierry when I was a girl. I had nightmares that she still pursued me. It seems odd to me now that in Salia, in a monastery where women and men were so strictly separated, I managed to find my way into a garden where a monk worked.”

  “Hindsight is a marvelous thing. It might have been an accident.”

  “I no longer believe it was, and yet I have no proof. Did I not say who came to fetch me in Varre, what person took me away from St. Thierry? It was Sister Clothilde.”

  “The same Clothilde who was St. Radegundis’ handmaiden and later her companion in the convent?”

  “The same one. I never doubted that she was loyal to Radegundis. I believed then and believe now that she would have smiled kindly and cut the throat of any person who crossed her. No one ever crossed her.”

  “Except you. For a novice to have carnal knowledge of a monk, both of them under her care, in the monastery—”

  “Nay, Sister, she knew of it. She was the one who witnessed our pledge of marriage. She allowed it to happen. That is why I am telling you this. When I was young, I was too passionate and too starved to think clearly. But Brother Marcus asked questions that woke my memories, and now I can see patterns that I could not read then. You are a historian, Sister. I am sharing my secret with you because I think there is an answer to be found. I think now that they left me alive because I was ignorant.”

  “Or because they thought you were dead.”

  Mother Obligatia smiled bitterly. “You have a mind for this, Sister. But I am now determined not to let my secret die with me. I lost my first two children because I had no power in the world, no kin to protect me. I now rule as Mother over a tiny convent of six nuns and two lay sisters. That we guard a mystery within was the charge given to the mothers here centuries ago, but I wonder if the skopos and her advisers have forgotten its existence.”

  “You have honored me with your confession, Mother.”

  “Nay, I have only given you another burden. You have a keen mind and a level heart, Sister. I beg you, find out why a man calling himself Brother Marcus came to our guest hall last summer and asked for me by the name Lavrentia, which I abandoned long ago.”

  The rock had a muffling effect, close and confining. On the king’s progress Rosvita had grown accustomed to the shouts of the wagoneers, the neighing of horses, the fall of rain, the heedless song of birds, the smell of the stable, and the laughter of wind on her face. Here, she couldn’t even hear the mice. Lord John and his men might labor a hundred miles away, for all that their work lay invisible and inaudible beyond rock walls. No vibrations, no cracks within the stone brought her any hint of the man who bided his time in the guest hall. Was Hugh still praying? Would God ever forgive him for his sins? Would God forgive her hers?

  “There is so much to find out.” Rosvita turned the pages of the Vita to the end. Fidelis had mastered the art of script; even Sister Amabilia had found nothing to criticize in his precise hand. He had spoken of such peculiar things. “The birds sing of the child known as Sanglant,” she said, remembering his words. “Have you ever heard of the Seven Sleepers, Mother?”

  “Of course. St. Eusebē tells the story of the Seven Sleepers in her History.”

  “You have heard no other tale that mentions them?”

  “I have not. Why would the birds sing of this Sanglant? What sorcerer understood their language?”

  “I do not know.” Her eye followed the writing and her lips shaped the words, and then a thought occurred to her and she spoke out loud. “‘The world divides those whom no space parted once.’ Do you suppose, Mother, that Fidelis was thinking of you when he wrote those words? I assumed he was writing of St. Radegundis. He lived on the men’s side as a monk for the entire span of St. Radegundis’ life there, almost fifty years. Until her death, he would never have known a world without her in it.”

  “Surely he wrote this Vita long after I had gone from his life. He must have repented if he went back to the church and became a hermit.”

  “Or he felt he had no choice. But he wandered far from Salia in his later years. He was a curious man, the one flaw they could not smooth off of him.”

  Mother Obligatia smiled as at a fond and distant memory. “He was a curious man once his interest had been roused.” The light of youth shone in her briefly, a glimpse of the fifteen-year-old girl who had captivated a fifty-year-old monk. Then she recalled who she was now, and she sighed. “God willed that I should spend my life in prayer. But sometimes I wonder what became of my two children. God forgive me, Sister. I am still afflicted with selfishness. In a way, I care nothing for your immortal soul or whether you condemn yourself by trafficking with an accused sorcerer. I want you to escape so that you can find out the truth, and I fear that if you surrender now, Lord John will imprison you and everyone in your party and hold you for ransom. You might be in his prison for years. You might die in Aosta. How then can you find out the truth? If there is no one to aid me, how can I be sure that no harm will come to those who live under my care?”

  “Do you think it possible that the stone crowns are harbors, gateways from one to the next? That we can actually travel between them?”

  “I do not know, but I know what my predecessors thought. They believed it.” She drew a finger over the pages of the old chronicle delicately, as if she feared it might dissolve at her touch. “That is why they recorded the stone circles here. They thought there was a pattern, hidden in plain sight if they could learn to read it.”

  A hand bell rang, the call to prayer.

  “What have you decided, Sister Rosvita? Will you counsel in favor of Lord Hugh’s plan, or against it?”

  “I don’t know. I must pray for God to give me counsel.”

  Rosvita closed both books and left them on the lectern as she assisted Mother Obligatia to rise. She offered her arm to her, and although Obligatia braced herself on Rosvita’s elbow, her touch was so insubstantial that it seemed more like a memory than an actual presence.

  With Theophanu a
nd Adelheid and their noble ladies in attendance, the chapel was crowded. Its walls curved up into a dome, laden with symbols painted onto the whitewashed wall: St. Ekatarina sits in the center, arms extended to either side, palms out in the gesture of an open heart and complete surrender to God in Unity; a pale crown composed of stars burns at her brow, the mark of a saint; above her, twin dragons twine through hoary clouds, engaged in the fiery battle that denotes the conflict inherent in a creation stained by darkness; beyond that, as if seen from the mountaintop, a palace gleams in the sky, no doubt meant to represent the Chamber of Light where all souls return when the robes of darkness have at last been lifted from their spirit after their ascension through the seven spheres after death.

  In deference to the several crippled or old sisters, railings had been set in rows so that, when they knelt, they might lean on wood. The dark grain was well polished, as if over the decades many of the nuns had needed a little such help at their prayers. After so many hours, Rosvita found herself exhausted. She, too, needed the compassionate support of the simple wood railing.

  She had been ill for a long time and recovering for a much shorter one, and now she felt flashes of heat, sweat breaking on her forehead and down her spine. The hair at the nape of her neck was damp, and her palms slick.

  Ai, Lady, she was tempted. Could Hugh bind the daimone? Could she see it done? She had never seen a daimone, of course, and the intense desire to see what she had never seen before and would likely never see again scalded her heart.

  They sang from the Sayings of Queen Salomae the Wise, who had lived long before the birth of the blessed Daisan.

  “Do not follow the path of evildoers. Turn aside. Avoid it.

  For the evil man cannot sleep unless he has done wrong.

  The evil woman cannot sleep unless she has caused someone’s downfall.”

  Yet she and Theophanu would become accomplices to Hugh’s misdeeds and his terrible acts if they accepted help from him, if they allowed him to aid them with that same sorcery they had been so eager to condemn him for before.

  “For although the lips of the sorcerer drip honey

  and his speech is smoother than oil,

  yet in the end he is as bitter as wormwood

  and as sharp as a two-edged sword.”

  Could she stain her own hands, even for a good cause? Yet she knew herself no saint, willing to die rather than compromise her own honor. If Adelheid died rather than submit to Ironhead, then Aosta would suffer. If Theophanu surrendered, then she and everyone in her party would endure imprisonment and possibly death at Ironhead’s hands.

  Surely under these circumstances God would forgive them for setting foot briefly on the path known otherwise only to the wicked. Yet when did the end ever justify the means?

  Mother Obligatia led the daily lesson in her frail voice. “Let us sing this day the hymn of creation, in honor of the feast day of St. Eulalia, she who was midwife to St. Edessia. Her hands brought forth that which is life to us, the blessed Daisan, who brought the Divine Word from heaven unto Earth.”

  “Everything is placed upon nothing.

  In this way the universe came to be.

  Yet something streamed out from the Father of Life

  and the Mother became pregnant in the shape of a fish

  and bore him; and he was called the Son of Life.

  As his soul descended through the seven spheres

  he partook only of pure things.

  He took into his spirit nothing impure as he descended.

  But we know this to be true, that the world is impure.

  We know this to be true,

  that the impure world separated him from the Father and Mother

  in whom he once dwelled without separation.”

  It came to Rosvita in that moment, unasked for, unexpected, a bolt from heaven not seen before it struck and shattered earth.

  “The world divides those whom no space parted once.”

  What if Fidelis was Radegundis’ son?

  Then the enormity of it slugged her. She was suddenly unable to catch her breath. The railing seemed to shift under her like the earth when a tremor wrenches the ground on which you had once stood firmly.

  What if Fidelis was Taillefer’s son, his rightful heir?

  “For God measured it and laid it out,

  the Father with the Mother by Their sexual union they founded it.

  They planted it with their descendants.

  To the Garden of Life, which is the Chamber of Light,

  all souls return.”

  If it were true, then why had Queen Radegundis not proclaimed abroad that Taillefer had a living son? Her silence had brought about the end of Taillefer’s great empire.

  Why had she not spoken?

  “Yet out of necessity Love compels us.

  It is completely impossible for a solitary one

  to bring forth and to bear,

  therefore he was the child that was produced by two,

  both Mother and Father, who together make life.”

  “What are you, Eagle?” Rosvita had asked Liath that night last summer when she had given the young Eagle The Book of Secrets, which she had stolen from Hugh, because she had believed Liath and not Hugh. And Liath had replied: “I am kinless.”

  “I lost my children because I had no kin to protect me,” Mother Obligatia had said not an hour before.

  Taillefer’s legitimate son would have reigned after him if Radegundis could have found support among the Salian nobility for enough years to raise an infant to manhood. Salian princes often killed their rivals for the throne, even if those rivals were blood relatives, even if they were children. Radegundis was a woman without family to stand behind her. Her kin had all been murdered when she herself was only a child. Why should she have trusted the Salian lords?

  “And he answered us, he said:

  You shall come to that paradise if you act rightly,

  if you heed the Word of Our Lady and Our Lord.”

  Radegundis had not wanted to be queen. Perhaps she chose to remove the child from the temptations of worldly power. Or perhaps she only wanted to protect the child from his enemies. How better to do so than to give him as a foundling to the very convent in which she served?

  What is in plain sight is hidden best.

  Theophanu glanced at her and made a question with her expression, as if to ask if she were well. Rosvita shook her head, to show that she needed no help. To negate these disturbing thoughts. It was too incredible. She couldn’t believe it.

  And yet it was so unbelievable that she had no choice but to believe it.

  “And he said to her, ‘When will we see your wedding feast,

  you who are the blush of the earth and the image of the water?

  For you are the daughter I set upon my knee and sang to sleep.

  We all came to be because of the union of Father and Mother.

  The road to purification arises out of conception and birth.’”

  Mother Obligatia had unknowingly given birth to Taillefer’s legitimate granddaughter forty-five years ago. What had happened to that child?

  As she knelt, the sweat cooling on her neck, the trembling in her hands subsiding, she was reminded again of words from the Holy Verses: “The beginning of wisdom is this: gain understanding, although it cost you all you have.”

  She had to escape, even if it cost her everything she had. She could not risk being held prisoner by Ironhead, even if it meant the greater risk of trusting to Hugh’s sorcery, even if it meant her own complicity in that sorcery.

  She had to find out if it were true. She had to find out what had happened to the child.

  She had promised Mother Obligatia, and it was obvious now that someone else had discovered the old woman’s secret and sought her out, hoping to find the only descendant of Emperor Taillefer, if she still lived. She had a duty to aid Adelheid and Theophanu. She owed loyalty to King Henry and his ambitions.

  But mostly, she w
as just so damned curious.

  Yet the song of Queen Salomae the Wise rang in her ears as the congregation knelt in silence and the rock walls of the tiny chapel breathed dust and the weight of uncounted years into the musty air:

  “Do not let your heart entice you to stray down his paths: many has he pierced and laid low. His victims are without number.”

  So be it.

  She had long known that curiosity would be her downfall. She would find out the truth, no matter where the path led her.

  5

  “TONIGHT,” Hugh had said when they told him they would accept his aid, and now she found herself buffeted by the flood of activity as they made ready to leave. She was a leaf torn and floating on an uncontrollable tide. She had to find Mother Obligatia and speak to her before they left—there had been no time before, everyone had conspired to drive them apart as soon as it became clear that they would risk what ought to have remained forbidden.

  And yet, she was exhilarated.

  “Sister Rosvita, I beg you, wake up.”

  For a moment she did not recognize the brown hair and broad face of the woman staring down at her. Had she kept her suspicions to herself? How long ago was it that she had been shaken by revelation?

  “May I help you rise, Sister? We must go now or we will be left behind.”

  She had fallen asleep in the library, slumped over the lectern. She had even drooled a little in her sleep; one corner of the chronicle was moist. Lady Leoba briskly put both the Vita of St. Radegundis and the copy so lovingly penned first by Sister Amabilia and then by Sister Petra into the sturdy leather pouch that contained Rosvita’s unfinished History.

  It was hard to stand. She felt weak and tired, and she ached everywhere. Her neck had stiffened, and her spine crackled with pops and creaks as she straightened. Her left knee hurt, and her knuckles felt swollen. This was the burden of age.