The Burning Stone

by Kate Elliott

  “Ai, God,” he says in disgust. He is oddly shadowed, a trick of the light, perhaps, or else his complexion is much darker than that of most Wendish folk. Standing above her groveling form, he surveys her with a prim frown quite at odds with the sheathed energy with which he holds himself “If only my dear Eadgifu hadn’t died,” he says as the girl snivels at his feet. “She was a real woman. What I would give for one more tumble in bed with her!”

  “Lust is the handmaiden of the Enemy,” she sobs.

  “I beg you,” he puts in, “pray do not delude yourself into thinking that you stir one grain of lust in me, Lady Tallia. It is your lineage I desire, not your person. Doubly descended from the throne of Wendar and the throne of Varre, and with so little to show for it! I would rather have my Eadgifu back. But God have made Their will manifest, and now we will be wed.”

  “Did not the blessed Daisan enjoin us to cleanse ourselves of the stain of darkness that contaminates us here on Earth?”

  “So he did.” He laughs, but he is not very amused. “I believe he preached that the road to purification lies through conception and birth.”

  “Nay,” she cries, as he kneels beside her and sets a hand on her side, rolling her over. She scuttles back out of his reach. “That is the lie. You are mistaken in believing the error.” She fetches up, panting, against the heavy chair in which the elder woman had sat earlier. She opens her hands as though to reveal a sign, but it is only her palms, marked by pus and weeping sores. “Don’t you know of the blessed Daisan’s sacrifice and redemption? I am no more worthy than any other vessel, and yet God has chosen me—”

  “Nay, your mother and I have chosen you. Good God. Get your servants to wash your hands properly after we’re through. Come now. Let’s get this over with.” He grabs her by an armpit and tugs her up toward the canopied bed, “Ai, Lady! You smell like sour milk. Don’t you ever wash?” He sits her on the bed, not ungently, but she falls back bonelessly and lies limp on the feather mattress as he begins to disrobe, quickly and without any amorous words or passionate glances. “Get you pregnant I must, so get your pregnant I will.”

  When he is down to almost nothing, she begins to sob violently. She bolts from the bed, trying to find somewhere to hide, but there is quite obviously nowhere to hide. She runs to the door and pounds on it, but her bony fists make scarcely any sound, and the heavy door is shut tight. No one answers.

  Zacharias recoiled. He could not bear more of it. It was too horrible.

  “This is not the mating ceremony I remember,” said Kansi-a-lari with cool disdain, and as he reflexively wiped his hand on his robe, he realized that she was still watching the scene unfold through the gate, her eyes narrowing, then widening; her mouth parted on an exhaled breath as she drew back swiftly. Then she chuckled. “Nay, that is not as I remember it. Maybe the years have changed human kin. They do such violence to each other.” She shivered, as if a spider had crawled up her spine or the Enemy’s fingers touched her at the base of the neck. “Let us go on. Now I worry. Now I know I did not leave all my doubts behind. Why have they hidden my son?”

  It was hard going as they set off again. He felt as though he were walking through a huge vat of mud. Soon he was taking two breaths for every step, and then three, and then four. Only the horse seemed unaffected, even a little impatient.

  He got a rhythm going—step, breathe and breathe and breathe and breathe, step, breathe and breathe and breathe and breathe—and he would not have stopped as the path curled away to reveal the second gate worn thin, a pale pink rose incised with faint letters and incomprehensible sigils. But she stopped. Her eyes flared as she set a palm against the stone of the gate. He saw, first, the quiet sea below and, for a miracle, the distant shore lying clean and clear under a night sky. Stars blazed. He saw no moon.

  Then, because he could barely stand, he, too, leaned against the gate. The pale stone warmed his skin.

  He smells burning fennel, and as his eyes adjust to night he sees two figures standing in darkness on the slope of a hill crowned with stones. One holds aloft a tightly-wrapped stick of herbs that smolders. His shoulders are strangely humped, and he holds a sword in one hand. Behind him, waiting patiently, stands a silent, strong warhorse, reins hanging loose over its head to trail on the ground. A shield is fixed to the saddle. A leadline attached to the saddle slithers and whips, and a moment later he sees a goat pulling restlessly against the resolute warhorse, which stands firm.

  The second figure, armed with a short sword and a bow, kneels and with an arrow’s shaft begins to trace a diagram in the dirt. The shaft has neither point nor fletching, but a gold feather that glows with a feeble light is bound to one end. The figure stands, sighting with that shaft toward the eastern horizon which, oddly enough, lies above her. By the curve of her body under her tunic he sees she is female, tall enough but not as tall as her companion, who by the breadth of his malformed shoulders must be male. It is too dark to make out features or expressions.

  Trees begin to sway. Leaves toss in a rising wind. Where a notch cuts the bulge of a mountain, a bright yellowish star appears. The woman chants and with the shaft and the rippling gold feather bound to its end, she seems to draw down that light until it tangles in the stone circle, weaving through the standing stones a pattern of faint light not unlike those sigils inscribed into the stone gate before him. She uses the shaft like a weaver’s shuttle as she sights on the brilliant light of the evening star, now sinking down on the horizon of high hills almost opposite that of the rising yellow star. This light she draws into the stone as well, and where the two lights meet, one malevolently yellow and the other as bright as an angel’s gaze, a thin archway of light forms between two of the standing stones.

  “Hurry,” she says to her companion, and with his free hand he grabs the reins of the horse. His cloak parts to reveal a good, strong mail coat underneath. A baby begins to cry. His shoulders quiver and shift, and little arms bat aside the corner of cape thrown over it: He is carrying an infant strapped to his back in place of his long sword. The goat bleats, tugging against the leadline as though it is itself being hauled backward by an invisible ebb tide.

  But there is a tide, drawing his gaze away from the scene by the stones and into the darkness, down into the valley below where a stone tower stands watch over a handsome timber hall. A stream burbles gaily past, and all is quiet; too quiet. In the stone tower, three figures sit deep in meditation, strange diagrams mark the table before them, and a silvery light gleams from the wood grain along the outline of those diagrams, a stylized rose, a sword, a crown, a staff, and others he has no time to decipher because the tide has dragged his body outward to the livestock pens beyond the tower where shadows have smothered even the light of the stars. From these shadows he can hear the whispers of the malcontent.

  “I am against it. It is rash to kill him now, when he could serve us in other ways if we are only patient.”

  “Nay, Sister. You are reluctant only because you do not comprehend the whole. We are all that protects humankind from the Lost Ones. You are either with us, or against us, and if you are against us, Sister Venia, then I have been instructed by Sister Anne to kill you.”

  “Very well.”

  He hears the panicked bleat of a goat just as he sees, as its echo, the flash of a knife. Night half conceals the gruesome sacrifice: a frowning woman cuts open the thrashing goat, which is held down by a man in cleric’s robes. She thrusts a hand inside its ribs as blood pumps out over her arm. She gropes, tugs, and pulls out its still beating heart. Somehow, horribly, the goat is still alive.

  “Light the lamp,” she says, and it is done. The glow of the lamp lends a slippery unreality to the scene as the goat bleats weakly and the heart beats liquidly in her hand. She begins to chant.

  A smell rises all around, like the breath of the forge, leaching somehow even through the iron gate that seals him away from the vision. Hairs rise on the nape of his neck, and his hands tingle as he is drawn on a wave of
shadows in the grip of the tidal current that flows up the hill and back to the man and the woman and the growing archway of light that now manifests within the stone circle.

  Abruptly, light flares from stone to stone, a cascade of brilliance, a patterned web like to one of the diagrams he glimpsed in the tower room below. The woman throws up a hand to shade her eyes, but it is too late. They are discovered. Figures pour out of the darkness, but he cannot tell what are shades and what are real, which are doubts and which are solid human forms. One of them cuts through the light-woven gateway with a polished black staff, and the threads unravel and fray into nothing as the man takes a cautious step backward, shoulder bumping up against the steady horse, and raises his sword.

  “Hurry,” said Kansi-a-lari. Her breath came in short bursts. Sweat had broken, streaming, on her brow. She hooked her spear haft between his body and the rose gate, and he now realized that he was flattened against it all along the length of his body, as if suction held him there. The haft pressed into his ribs, broke him free, and he stumbled back.

  “Hurry,” she repeated. As she turned to run down the path between the high walls, she was already getting her bow ready, and she drew out the first of the arrows fletched with griffin feathers, whose touch dissolves magic.

  He had to run to keep up. The tide dragged against him, but the horse, and her urgency, pulled him forward against the flow.

  Then the ebony gate shone before him. Through its glamour, he saw the sea lapping at its base, a white-capped storm surge. The path gleamed underneath his feet, rimed with a frostlike gleam. He knelt, entirely out of breath, and even with both hands to brace himself on the ground, he could barely hold himself up.

  “Grandson.” Her voice shook through the earth.

  But he had no time to answer her. Kansi-a-lari had already cut one of her palms and smeared the blood over the black stone. She cut his palm in the same manner, with more haste than care. As he swiped his bleeding hand over the stone she nicked the horse on the shoulder and wiped its blood there, too, dark smears soaking into the slick obsidianlike surface. Sweating now, grunting with desperation and anger, she laid both hands against the ebony gate. She spoke one word.

  The gate swung open on silent hinges. Water poured in to swallow their feet, and he followed her across the threshold into the maelstrom.

  XIV

  THE SOUND OF THEIR WINGS

  1

  HANNA had just about had enough rain for one summer, and she was one of the lucky ones: riding, her feet weren’t perpetually damp. Unlike half the Lions, she didn’t have foot rot. In the woodlands, low ground shone with a sheet of shallow water, ponds that bred mosquitoes so persistent and numerous that every soul in their party scratched constantly. They were plagued by spiders. Any helmet left on the ground would soon swarm with the nasty creatures; any tent, unrolled and set up, would rain spiders from its ceiling all night. By Aogoste they had lost all the whores and beggars.

  At the fortress of Machteburg, dysentery hit their ranks. Lady Fortune still marched with them: only one Lion died, although the disease devastated the camp followers and at least a dozen of the cavalry’s servants had to be buried by the roadside. They lost ten days before Captain Thiadbold and Lord Dietrich proclaimed them ready to march on. They were ferried across the Oder River on barges, and then they headed east on a grassy track. A dozen stubborn camp followers boasting two handcarts between them plodded in their wake. She couldn’t understand why they would follow the Lions into the wilderness where nothing awaited them except war. But perhaps those dozen souls had nothing to go back to, and no place else to go.

  It was still raining.

  Three abysmally slow days of marching later, on a soggy summer’s day in early afternoon, they came to a village of ten longhouses and a dozen more pit-houses and sheds. Ringed by an inner palisade and ditch, the village lay at a crossroads and was prosperous enough to boast a tiny church built just beyond the inner ditch. A second ditch surrounded the gardens, fields, and a half-dozen corrals, and within this second ditch a fair number of folk labored. But as soon as they caught sight of the host approaching, they hoisted their tools and ran to the safety of the palisade even though they all could see the Wendish banner that marked this as an army marching under King Henry’s personal seal.

  Thiadbold halted his Lions beyond the outer ditch and sent Hanna in with an escort of a dozen Lions. The cavalry was content to disperse in the surrounding meadowland so that their horses could graze.

  The gate remained stubbornly closed as they approached. “Nay, you cannot come in,” said the young man keeping watch there, peering down at them from a square wooden tower. “I pray you, we’ve had enough trouble. I’m under orders not to let in any armed men.” He spoke Wendish with an accent, hissing his “p”s and “t”s. “But the Eagle, now. She can come in with her news.”

  Ingo was with her. “As like they’re bandits themselves in this town,” he grumbled. “I don’t know if we can trust them.”

  “Nay, I’ll go,” said Hanna. “They’re only being cautious. Why would they harm me with an army of two hundreds of Lions and thirty cavalry outside?”

  Ingo and the others moved back, the pedestrian gate was opened, and she walked through into the village. It stank because most of their livestock had been driven inside. There were a few gardens, and a fair number of dirty children underfoot. A stream muddied by the summer rains, or by sewage, ran down a narrow canal with reinforced stone walls. There was a well at the center of the village; a pair of young villagers, one girl and one boy, stood guard over the stone housing, monitoring the flow of buckets. A child appeared, wiped its runny nose, and beckoned to her. She followed it to the longhouse that lay closest to the well. Three men and three women waited for her, seated at a huge wooden table much pitted with knife scars and burns. It had one leg freshly fixed on, of a lighter shade than the others. They greeted her politely. After she sat, a girl dressed in a remarkably clean linen gown brought her a fine strong mead.

  “We meant no offense by closing our gates,” said the scarred woman who acted as spokeswoman for the council. The scars looked recent, two slashes on her chin. “Not that we don’t trust the king’s milites, mind you, but we’ve had trouble recently with armed bands. Better to be safe. War’s coming, they say.” The council members nodded. The girl brought a fresh pitcher of mead and refilled cups all the way around the table.

  “What kind of armed bands?” asked Hanna. Some of the words the woman used were unfamiliar, and her accent was a bit odd, although once she got used to the hissing it was easy enough to understand. “Bandits? Barbarians?”

  “We’ve Salavii neighbors, it’s true, but it’s not them we’re worried about now. Just four days ago a wild group of young men come from the west claiming to be noble sons of Saony. There was trouble, and it weren’t pleasant. They did that to three of the girls here in town that isn’t right, begging your pardon, Eagle, and one of our lads got knifed in the bargain. But Lady Fortune smiled on us. Just when things were about to get ugly, Margrave Judith rode up with a host, why, surely as large as yours and perhaps larger, for she had more horses and riding men. She turned them out with a sharp word!” The others at the table nodded as they, too, remembered the incident. “But the damage was done. Poor young Hilde hung herself at the old oak tree two nights ago, and there’s some who want to cut it down because of evil spirits. It’s the place where our old mothers used to leave offerings to The Fat One—” Here, at a sharp gesture from one of her comrades, she smiled nervously and gestured to the servant to bring forward bread. “But that’s none of your worry, Eagle.”

  “Of course it is my worry,” said Hanna. “If bandits are plaguing you, or even noblewomen’s sons, then King Henry will wish to be told of it.”

  “What can he do?” asked one of the men bitterly. “The leader of them wild boys claimed to be the king’s nephew. What will he do? We are nothing to the king.”

  “It’s true that you’re no
blood kin of the king’s, friend. But you live under his protection, and if he lets wild young men, even his nephew, take what they want and harry as they will among those folk who look to the king for protection, then he might as well hand the whole of his treasure over and set aside his crown. The king does not tolerate disobedience, even from his nephews. I’ve seen civil war, my friends, and I know that King Henry will not tolerate any behavior that cuts into his authority. No more would you let your own young children run roughshod through your house, overturning the tables and throwing the apples out to rot.”

  They nodded, seeing the wisdom in this answer.

  “What was his name, who was leader of that warband?” But they didn’t know, or wouldn’t answer. They were still afraid. The bread steamed when she broke it open. “Well, then, what of Margrave Judith? Did she say where she was marching? What road did she take when she left here?”

  “East and south, she said,” explained the scarred woman. “She was going at the summons of the king’s daughter, so we heard. That’s how we know war’s coming. There’s been fighting. Some say the wing-men are coming. We’ve spoken of building a second palisade. Is it true they cut off people’s heads?”

  It took Hanna a moment to figure out who the wing-men were. “I’ve heard that story,” she said cautiously, not wanting to scare them. And yet, what chance did this village have against a host of Quman warriors? They had built a stout palisade and a good steep-sided ditch further fortified by stakes at the bottom, but there weren’t all that many of them. “I rode with Princess Sapientia and Prince Bayan, her husband. They defeated a host of Quman, but it was only an advance force.”

  “Should we abandon our homes and go west?” demanded the man who had spoken before.

  “Nay, Ernust,” retorted the scarred woman. “If we leave, then those damned Salavii tribesmen will just move in and take our village, and never give it back!”