Crown of Stars

by Kate Elliott

There are a dozen mermen, or a hundred. He cannot see into the depths. Hulls block the light. Another Eika flails in the water nearby, trying not to sink, but that brother remains untouched as the merfolk swarm around Stronghand. In another moment Stronghand will black out and inhale sea-water, and he will sink and drown. They will devour him, as they devoured all the others thrown into the sea. That was the bargain, made long ago.

  Why would they desire man flesh and Eika flesh when there are, after all, so many fish in the sea?

  The knife has twisted free of his trousers. He kicks upward and plunges it into the side of the merman, using the flesh of the merman as leverage to launch himself to the surface while his victim thrashes and others close in to feast on blood and entrails.

  A hand grips his ankle. Teeth sink into the flesh of his calf. He breaks the surface, coughs and splutters, sucks in air

  Alain gulped in a mouthful of water. Thrashing, he found himself underwater

  but too late. The water closes back over his face as he is dragged down by the leg. Harder than iron are the teeth of the merfolk, able to pierce easily the skin of the RockChildren. He has lost his knife, but he has other weapons.

  His claws, unsheathed, rake through the writhing hair of the creature that has fastened onto him. Like eels severed in half they squirm through water now clouded by sheets of blood rising off the one that spoke in the voice of Nokvi. His leg is released. He swims up and breaches the surface again just as a hand gropes in his hair, grips, yanks, and drags him onto the ship

  The pain of being tugged up by his hair washed all other thoughts out of his head. He yelped and, all at once, heard the hounds barking madly and the sound of men swearing and shouting in alarm.

  “What are you doing?” cried the crone. “Trying to drown yerself?”

  A closer shriek startled her. She released his hair and turned, then yelled in fear. He was still gulping for air. He barely had time to register the clippity of nails on stone, the big shapes coming at a run, and they jumped and with a mighty splash shuddered the entire bath.

  After that, the uproar erupted like battle with folk running in to stare, or roar, or laugh, or shriek complaints, each according to his or her nature. Alain could not help but laugh to see Sorrow and Rage swim to the lip of the bath, but they could not climb out and so he had to swim over to shove them, with great difficulty, out of the water. They sneezed, and shook themselves in a cascade of droplets, and sneezed again, disgusted with the taste and heat.

  “Out! Out!” cried the taller crone, and the shorter one traded her broom for a many-tined rake to try to get dog hair out of the water. So much shed in so short a time!

  Alain scraped his knee climbing out and was not even given a scrap of cloth to dry himself with before Captain Lukas yelled at him to hurry up, although the captain kept a safe distance. The hounds yawned hugely, displaying their teeth.

  So they proceeded with Alain damp and dressed in a spare wool tunic furnished by an unknown donor; it smelled of dried cod. He wore his own worn sandals and, under the tunic, the loose linen shirt packed by Aunt Bel that he had so far kept clean. He walked without protest, climbing the steep stairs that led to the palace. A spitting rain started up, but a roof covered the stairs all the way up the hill; no sense in the emperor getting wet on his way to or from the baths. Stone pillars supported the timber roof. There were no walls. As they climbed, the town opened up before them, alleys and courtyards and cisterns coming into view below in an orderly layout whose bones reminded the educated man that Autun had begun its days centuries ago as a Dariyan fort. Square, orderly, explicable. His thoughts, in contrast, churned like the disturbed waters of Rikin Fjord, still flashing in remembered bursts of vision before his sight.

  Gasping, he spits out seawater and turns to confront his rescuer. It is Papa Otto who has grabbed him and hauled him free, while his Eika brothers thrust with spears at the swarming mermen in the water. Now that he is clear of the waters, the attack breaks off. The Eika brother swims, unmolested, to the third ship and is hoisted aboard.

  He passed pillars carved in the likenesses of magnificent beasts: a phoenix, a guivre, a dragon. A noble griffin, staring at him with painted sea-blue eyes. A wolf, an eagle, and a proud lion.

  The blue waters roil as a second swarm of merfolk surge into the fjord in the wake of Stronghand’s ships. They circle the tiny fleet before diving into the abyss. Are they warring, one faction against the other? It is impossible to pierce the depths, now clouded and hazy like the heavens but with a darker veil of streaming blood released by battle joined below.

  Stronghand stands at the stem of the ship staring down in the waters, but he can see nothing and he has only questions. His leg bleeds, the pale blood dripping onto the deck and diluted by the skin of salt water slipping back and forth over the planks with each slight pitch of the ship as it glides into the sound.

  He calls to Papa Otto. “You saved me,” he says. “How can I reward you?”

  The man shakes his head. “My lord.” He says nothing more.

  “What do you want? You were a slave once. Now you speak on my council. What do you want?”

  “My lord,” says the man, trembling now, and it is evident that some strong emotion has overcome him. He will not speak. He cannot.

  “Well, then, Otto. When you know, you must tell me. You have earned a reward this day.”

  “Yes, my lord,” the man says obediently, but he weeps, as humans do when their emotions overwhelm them. And despite everything, Stronghand still does not truly understand them.

  From ahead, he smells the fires of home. A faint hum raises the hair on the back of his neck. His dogs yip.

  OldMother is waiting for him.

  “She’s at prayer,” said a guardsman to Captain Lukas.

  Alain shook himself to a halt just before he slammed into the captain’s broad back. Lukas had stopped at the top of the stairs, below a gate carved with Dariyan rosettes. Beyond lay the remembered courtyard, lined on one side by a stone colonnade and on the other, just to their left, by a stone rampart that opened onto a spectacular view of the town below, although from this angle Alain saw only one corner of the cathedral tower. The graveled courtyard had recently been raked and tidied. Opposite stood the famous octagonal chapel with its proud stone buttresses. He heard hymnal singing and, from farther away and therefore harder to place by direction, male laughter.

  “An odd time to be praying,” commented the captain, “unless you’re the queen.”

  The guardsman and Lukas were clearly old friends, and indeed the other man wore the badge of a captain as a clasp for his cloak. “True enough.” He chuckled and said, with a smirk, “Praying in thanksgiving, the lady is. The queen gave birth at dawn.”

  “Is that so?” asked Captain Lukas, eyes widening as he leaned toward his comrade. “Girl or boy?”

  “A lad, wouldn’t you know it? It’ll be proclaimed in three days if the mite survives that long. The other two didn’t.”

  “Yes, I recall it, but the older girl seems likely to stick. Still.” He glanced around to make sure none of the other guards could overhear, and leaned closer. “Still. How is the duke taking it?”

  “Look there,” said the other guard, pointing back down the stairs. “Here he comes. He went out hunting.”

  The stairs wound down the slope, switching back several times, and because they were sheltered under a roof, with no walls, it was difficult to see the procession the guardsman alluded to, but the lively clatter of their progress drifted on the breeze. The hounds had their ears up and were looking that way with interest.

  “What are these great beasts?” added the guard, extending a hand toward Sorrow. “Here, boy. Are you the friendly one? You’re a big one, aren’t you?”

  Sorrow gave a warning growl, ears flattening, and the guardsman withdrew his hand. “I’ve seen the like of these beasts before, but I can’t recall where. You’d think a man would never forget such monsters!”

  “Come on,”
said Captain Lukas, beckoning to his men who were, after all, waiting on the stairs in the path of the approaching company. “Move along to the chapel, but keep at the back, and make sure you’re quiet.” He nodded at Alain. “The lady won’t mind it if the hounds rest just inside the door. She often brings her coursers with her, as does the duke. His alaunts and whippets are usually with him. Will they fight with other dogs?”

  “Only if they’re attacked.”

  The captain took him at his word. It was a rare man who did not know his dogs well enough to understand and predict their behavior, and such dogs would never have sat still for long stretches; they would have been off and sniffing and snuffling into every crook and cranny they could find no matter how furiously their master called them back. Most folk did not have time for ill-trained dogs, and certainly would not go to the trouble to feed them.

  A number of soldiers loitered under the colonnade, watching with interest but without initiative.

  “There are many soldiers here in Autun,” remarked Alain.

  “Truly,” agreed Captain Lukas good-naturedly as they crossed the gravel, footsteps shifting and grinding on the rocks. “More soldiers than commoners, it’s said.”

  “How are the soldiers all fed?”

  “Taxes. Tithes.” He shrugged. “The lady takes what she needs. It’s to the benefit of all to be protected.”

  “What if there’s a poor harvest this year? It seems likely, doesn’t it? So cold as it is still that folk can’t risk planting for fear a late frost will kill the seedlings.”

  “That’s not my concern.”

  “It might become so, if the lady can’t feed her soldiers.”

  “She’ll not turn us out. War’s coming. Perhaps you haven’t heard.”

  “Coming from where?”

  “They say the Wendish mean to drag us back though we’ve no wish to cower under the yoke of the Wendish regnant. Not anymore. Not now we have a queen of our own.”

  To think of Tallia no longer hurt him. They entered the chapel and took a place at the back, under the ambulatory where the other servants and hangers-on waited.

  This was prayer, of a kind. Lady Sabella knelt on a thick pillow, her chin resting on a fist. She stared not at the altar where a cleric intoned psalms but at the stone effigy of Taillefer. After a moment she leaned to her right to murmur to an attendant, a youthful man with the burly shoulders of a fighter and hunter. A dozen noble companions surrounded her, and the buzzing murmur of their conversation provided an undertone to the pious prayers of the clerics.

  Alain had stood inside the famous chapel before. There was something missing. Alternating blocks of light-and-dark stone gave a pattern to the eight vaults opening onto the central floor. Above, the dome swept into the heavens, ringed by a second and third tier of columns. So might the faithful rise toward heaven, the righteous yet higher above, painted onto the stony piers, until at last the bright and distant Chamber of Light far above could be touched by the angels.

  The chapel had not changed. The tempest had not shaken it. But something really was missing, and he had to search the chapel a second time before he realized what it was.

  The hands belonging to the stone effigy of Emperor Taillefer were empty. The crown of stars was gone. The stone figure clutched at air. The sight struck Alain so strangely that he smiled. So often we grasp at the very thing we cannot keep hold of, and even after we have lost it, our life is shaped by that wish and the action of grasping. So it is with those who, like stone, are carved into an unchanging form. We make ourselves into stone because we fear to change.

  “‘How can I repay God for all that They have given me?’” sang the clerics. “‘I raise the cup of deliverance and speak my vows to God in the presence of all of Their people.’”

  There came in a rush through the door a pack of hearty, laughing, chattering men still sweaty and dirt-stained from their ride. Sabella looked up. Even the clerics faltered, turning to see, but one nudged another while a third put pressure on a fourth’s foot, and so the service lurched forward despite the unseemly interruption.

  Conrad the Black knelt beside Sabella, pulled a dry stalk of grass out of his beard, and crumbled it into dust between his fingers.

  “News from the borderlands.” Perhaps he was trying to keep his voice low in deference to the prayers of thanksgiving, but the acoustics of the hall magnified his speech so every soul in the ambulatory could hear him although he was not, in fact, shouting. “We’ve got control of the mines again, but I need workers. That Eika raid last year cleaned out the countryside. They’ve got a throat hold all along the coast and some ways down three of the rivers.”

  “Haven’t you workers in Wayland?”

  “The roads are worse there than here, what with the landslides and fallen trees from last autumn. Easier to march from Autun to the mines than from Bederbor to the mines, although it’s a longer road from Autun.”

  Her fist had opened. Her stern and rather bored expression had altered to one of intense interest. “Then Salian workers.”

  “Raid into the nest of hornets? That’s a poor use of my soldiers. I might need them at any time.”

  “Nay, nay,” she said irritably, “I meant you to take as many as you like from among the refugees. That will get them off the roads and stop them from making themselves a nuisance. Round them up and drive them in a herd. There are folk in Autun, too—some we’ve already driven out, but others you may take as you wish. More than we need. Consult with my captains. Plenty of labor here for the mines. It will save us bread later.”

  “Yes,” Conrad mused, “that will work. But it will still take a long time to get benefit from those mines.”

  “Better we control them than the Salians do. Better we control stores of precious metals against the coming battle.”

  “Will it come to battle?” he asked her. “If Mother Scholastica means to support our cause, then it need not come to battle.”

  “Do you fear the bastard?”

  He snorted. “I am no fool. He’s a strong commander. Call that fear if you want, Cousin. I call it prudence.”

  “Are you a dog unwilling to fight? I call that submitting.”

  “These are cheap tricks meant to goad me. I’ll fight if I must, but not if the odds are against us.”

  “Shall we just hand Varre over,” she asked sweetly, “and pray for our Wendish cousins to place their feet atop our backs while we wallow in the dirt? We might have everything, Conrad. Everything!”

  He laughed curtly. “Then you lead the charge! If you’re so eager.”

  “Do not speak disrespectfully to me!”

  He glowered. He was flushed, hot, irritated. The clerics drew in breath and began a new psalm.

  “I praise God, and God have answered me.

  God’s love is steadfast.

  God’s faithfulness is eternal.”

  Rage whined, ears flattening, and swung her head around to stare at the door.

  “You’re right to be cautious,” said Sabella, “nor do I mean to mock you, Conrad. But I believe that my aunt is sincere in her communication with us. If we are bold, and clever, then we will rule Varre and Wendar. Just as I ought to have done all along, since I am eldest child of Arnulf.”

  Conrad’s companions had settled themselves wherever they could find room, blocking many of the lines of sight beneath the vaults, although Alain could still see Sabella, Conrad, and Taillefer’s carved visage. Conrad was a good-looking man, powerfully built, tall, broad, muscular. He had a dark face and a trim black beard and mustache around mobile lips.

  “What’s this?” He looked toward the doors. “Good God!”

  His expression darkened. He rose, hands set on hips as he frowned.

  The commotion spilled into the gathered worshipers as wind disturbs an autumn meadow, turning leaves and scattering branches. Folk exclaimed. One, unseen, cried out in fear. There came stewards in bold red tabards pushing open a path and behind them a litter borne by four servingme
n. Behind these staggered a weeping nurse with a bundle swaddled in white linen nestled in her arms.

  “Tallia!” said Conrad.

  “What are you doing?” Sabella extended a hand, and two of her companions leaped forward to help her stand.

  Yet, after all, to see her pained him. It was not an agony, only a pinprick, like a point of pressure that bit until, just piercing the skin, it drew a bead of blood. He had forgiven her. He had grown beyond her and had loved and been loved by a woman worthy of all these things. But the innocent love he had once offered Tallia was still a part of him, and that part, betrayed, could not help but remember.

  Tallia reclined on the litter, propped up on pillows. She was pale, as if she had lost a great deal of blood, but her skin had a shining gleam, still swollen taut with pregnancy’s aftermath. She moaned, shifting uncomfortably. By the curve of her limbs traced by the drape of the fabric pulled tight, he saw that all trace of her ascetic’s starvation had been obliterated. Someone had made her eat, and eat well. Her beautiful wheat-colored hair was slick with sweat, all in a tangle across her torso. She lifted her head.

  “Pray!” she said in a low, tortured voice. “Pray for the child. Ai! It is too late.”

  Conrad struck the heel of his hand to his chest once, twice, and three times. “Ai, God! So I feared!” He wept, as a bereaved father should, and his companions wept with him.

  “Bring it here!” ordered Sabella.

  The nurse came hesitantly, but when she offered the child to Sabella, the noblewoman waved her away. “I can see! No need to touch it! Where is the midwife?”

  No one knew.

  “Hunt her down.” Sabella snapped fingers, looked around, and caught sight of Captain Lukas at the back of the crowd. His height made him easy to mark among the mob. “Your hunt, Captain. See that you find her.”

  “Stay here,” he said to Alain. He gathered his men and hurried out, leaving two men, one on either side of Alain. The hounds whined, forced up against the back wall by the press of more folk crowding in to see what was going on. Tallia’s procession had attracted notice outside. Everyone was whispering.