by Kate Elliott
Some indeed wore gold surcoats bearing the sigil of a black dragon. Anna did not know what this meant, only that the one time she had seen a procession go by, bearing a banner to mark the passage of a noble lord or lady, it had not been this one but some other creature, a hound perhaps or a horse. This mystery—who were these soldiers? Had they died in the last battle, when the city was overwhelmed? How had they come to be dumped in this holy crypt like so much refuse?—she could not answer.
Gaping skulls grinned up at them, but Anna no longer feared them. They were dead; they had fought to save their kin, their human brothers and sisters, and so they would not disturb her and Matthias now. In this way she was able to find a path through their bodies, to nudge them gently aside when necessary. Once, when she saw a knife protruding from a rib cage, she carefully pried it out and took it for herself, thanking the poor dead soul who had in this way saved it for her. You never knew when you might need another knife.
Beyond the dead soldiers they followed the light farther into the crypt, past the gravestones of the holy dead, those who were once biscops and deacons and good men and women who labored for the church, until they came to a secret corner and found there what the daimone had promised them: a staircase leading down into the earth, illuminated by the whisper of light that had led them there.
Anna felt hope swell in her heart, of itself a light against the darkness of despair and dread.
Matthias hesitated and then, not looking back, started down the stairs, testing each one carefully before he set his full weight on it. Because he still held her hand, because she feared more than anything else in the world losing him, she had to follow. Yet she looked back over her shoulder—though she could see nothing but darkness behind them—and spoke a solemn vow:
“We’ll come back for you, Papa Otto, for you and all the others but especially for you.”
The stairs led down a long way and all of it in darkness. They felt their way along, groping along the wall with the flats of their hands, and when at last the stairs ended and the wall curved and then straightened, a breeze caught her lips and she tasted something strange on it, something she had not tasted for many months: fresh air untainted by a city’s death, and green things growing in plain good earth, not in the crevices between fallen stones.
They walked for a long while, resting a few times although never for long.
When they emerged from the tunnel, it was dawn.
They came out of a cave’s mouth to see a field of oats run wild and a few buildings that looked abandoned. Behind the narrow cave mouth rose a ridge of rock and up this Matthias scrambled, Anna right behind him. From the ridge they looked back over the empty countryside to the city below, resting like a jewel on an island in the middle of the broad river. From this distance one would never guess what lay inside. It looked like a perfect toy model of a city, untouched, gently gleaming in the early morning sunlight.
“I should have killed it,” said Matthias.
“Killed what?” she asked. “The Eika?” Without thinking, she clasped her Circle of Unity. She could not stop thinking about the Circle of Unity that had hung at its chest.
“The daimone,” he said. “I should have killed it with the knife. Then it would have been free of the mortal body and able to go home to the heavens. Wouldn’t that have been a better trade?”
Anna shook her head. “I don’t think any human can kill a daimone. They aren’t like us, they don’t have our blood, and maybe they don’t have blood at all the way we do. You would just have made it mad.”
He sighed. “Maybe so. But I pity that poor soul. If it has a soul.”
She hesitated, but then she asked, “Do Eika have souls?”
“Of course not!”
“But that one—it saw us, and it let us go. It wore a Circle, Matthias. If it wore a Circle, isn’t it kin of ours because it also believes in God?”
“It just stole it from a body and wears it as a trophy. I don’t know why it let us go. Maybe St. Kristine watched over us and blinded its eyes.” He turned his back on the city and began to climb back down the hill. “Come, Anna. I don’t know how far we’ll have to walk before we find people.”
But St. Kristine, while surely saving them, had not blinded the Eika’s eyes. Anna knew that. It had seen her touch her Circle, and it had copied her movement. It had let them go, knowingly, deliberately. Just as every human slave in the city had conspired to set them free, which was only what they would have done for their own kin.
It was a beautiful summer’s day and they walked free through bright woods and drank from free-flowing streams and ate, carefully, a few moist berries. At dusk Matthias saw a campfire. The astonished woodsmen—set here in the forest to hunt and to keep an eye out for Eika incursions—gladly traded them food for one of the extra knives, and let them sleep huddled by the coals. In the morning one woodsman escorted the children to the nearest village.
“Let me give you some advice,” said the woodsman, who was small and wiry and cheerful, and who had lost one finger on his left hand. “There’s little room in Steleshame these days, with all the refugees. But you’ve value in the news you bring, so don’t sell it cheap, and you might get to stay there. Ask for an apprenticeship, lad, and something to keep your sister busy with and cared for until she’s old enough to marry. Lady’s Blood! It is a miracle. We never thought to see any other folk walk alive out of the city. How did you survive? How did you get free?”
Matthias told a brief version of the story, but when he got to the end, he didn’t mention the Eika. For the Eika was not part of Matthias’ story. And yet the Eika puzzled Anna most. But she kept silent. All humans hated the Eika. They had every reason to, for the Eika were savages and their dogs the most hideous creatures living.
“Your brother will no doubt find work with a tanner, child,” the woodsman said to Anna. “Have you any skills?”
She did not mean to say it. It popped out unbidden. “When I’m old enough, I’ll travel like the fraters do. I’ll bring the Holy Word and the Circle of Unity to the Eika. They can’t be meant to be savages.”
He laughed, but not unkindly, only shaking his head as adults did when children said something they considered silly. Matthias shushed her and made a face.
But the day was very beautiful, and they were free, and perhaps if they brought news that slaves still lived in the city, someone—some noble lady or lord—might lead an expedition to free the others. If only Papa Otto and the rest could hold on for that long.
She thought for a long while as she walked through the woodland. She and Matthias had lost both father and mother and been given into the callous care of their uncle. Yet it was not their uncle—their only remaining kinsman— who had saved them. He had tried only to save himself and she supposed she would never know if he still walked among the living or rotted among the forgotten dead. It was Papa Otto—no blood father of theirs—and the other slaves who had saved them. If they, who were not her true kin, could act as kin, then was it not possible that even an Eika could become kin? This thought she held like a gift in her heart. Matthias had given the daimone the knife, which it could use to defend itself or free itself if such were possible, and in exchange it had given them freedom.
But in the end, after all that had happened, it was the solitary Eika who had stayed its hand and let them go.
PART ONE
DIVINATION
BY
THUNDER
I
THE MUSIC OF WAR
1
HE smelled the storm coming before the first rumble of thunder sounded far in the distance. The dogs stirred restlessly and nipped at him, but he slapped them aside until they whined and hunkered down at his feet.
Bloodheart appeared not to have heard the distant thunder. The Eika chieftain sat on his throne, just out of reach of his captive’s chains, and measured leg and arm bones that had been scraped clean of flesh. Tossing aside those he did not want, he sawed off the knobby joint ends of th
e bones until he had half a dozen smooth white lengths of various sizes collected in his lap. With a sharp stick he hollowed out the bones, cleaning out the marrow. Then, using a stone burin mounted on a stick, he drilled holes down the length of the hollow bones. All this he worked in silence, except for the hasp of the obsidian saw, the rasp of wood scraping, and his muted grunting breaths as he twirled stick between palms to drive the drill through.
Beyond, other sounds made a counterpoint to Bloodheart’s task. The old priest crouched on the marble floor as he tossed out finger bones into a random pattern read and swept aside; outside, Eika soldiers played a game on the cathedral steps which involved a head in a sack; thunder muttered far away, and the Veser River, a low roar too faint here for human ears to hear, sang its constant familiar chant.
The dogs, slinking away, gnawed at the discarded bones, cracking them open for the marrow inside. The most faithful brought a few bones back to drop at his feet, his portion as their lord. God knew he was hungry all the time now, but never let it be said he had stooped to this: eating human remains.
He fought back the shattering despair. It came on him in waves as out of nowhere, out of the shadows or out of Bloodheart’s enchantment that shackled him here, bound by more than iron. Caught in a sudden fit of uncontrollable shaking, he clutched chains in his hands and scraped them violently against the marble floor until his skin was rubbed raw and the chains polished to a shining gleam but with no least weakening of their heavy links.
Only then, when the dogs began to growl around him sensing his weakness, when his blood dripped on the pale marble to form little rosettes of agony against cold stone, did he remember himself, cuff them into submission, and look up.
Teeth bared, Bloodheart grinned down from his chair. “Prince of dogs,” he said, his voice as whispery as the flutter of birds in the eaves. “Shall I make a flute out of your bones when you are dead?”
“You will never kill me,” he replied in his hoarse voice. Some days, these were the only words he remembered how to say.
But Bloodheart was not even listening. Instead, the Eika chieftain lifted the smooth white tubes one by one to his lips, testing their tone. Some breathed high, some low, and on them, switching from one to the next, he played a ragged melody while at last lightning flashed, seen through the great cathedral windows, and thunder broke overhead, and the Eika soldiers outside laughed uproariously in the sudden drenching rain and continued their game.
2
“TWO months!” King Henry paced under the awning while rain drizzled beyond the overhang, dripping down the sides of his tent, curling down tent poles in slow streams. “I have wasted two months on these dammed stubborn Varren lords when we could have been marching on Gent!”
Liath had taken shelter under a wagon; with night watch ahead, she had been permitted an afternoon’s nap. Thank the Lady the rain had not drenched the ground. She was still dry, and now she listened as Henry’s advisers rallied around him, soothing his temper.
“You could not have left Varre behind that quickly,” said his favored cleric, Sister Rosvita, in her usual calm voice. “You have done the right thing, Your Majesty, the only thing you could do. Your anger toward the Eika is justified, and when the time is right, they will suffer your wrath.”
“The time will never be right!” Henry was in one of his rare sour moods. Liath could see only legs and torsos from this angle, and while any soul would have known Henry by the belt he wore embossed and painted with the badges of each of the six duchies whose princes owed allegiance to him as king regnant, on this day he was also recognizable by the sheer irritable energy he projected as he paced from one corner of the carpet to the other. “Five sieges we have laid in, in the last two months.”
“None of them lasted more than five days,” said Margrave Judith with disdain. “None of these Varren nobles had any stomach for a fight, knowing Lady Sabella was defeated.”
“Your Majesty.” Now Helmut Villam weighed in, and the others paused to listen respectfully to the words of a man whose age and experience of hard campaigns eclipsed even that of the king. “Once Lady Svanhilde surrenders to your authority, we can turn east. You have sent what Eagles you can to the Wendish dukes and nobles, to raise the alarm. But do not forget that after the battle we fought near Kassel, your forces are too weak in any case to attack the Eika at Gent. It will take time to assemble a new army.”
“Damn Sabella,” said Henry. “I was too lenient with her.”
“She is our sister, Henry,” said Biscop Constance. Though the rebuke was mild, only one of Henry’s powerful younger sisters would have dared utter it.
“Half sister,” muttered the king, but he had stopped pacing.
“She is safely confined under my authority in Autun, where I will soon return,” added Constance, who despite her youth had the grave authority of a much older woman. He grunted, acknowledging this truth.
They began to talk about the disposition of this latest siege, invested yesterday afternoon, and what route they would take when they at last marched east through northern Arconia back into Wendar.
The rain slackened and stopped. Liath wormed out from under the wagon, strapped on sword and quiver and draped her saddlebags over her shoulder, then went hunting for food. Rations had been scarce the past several weeks. Hard as it was to feed the king’s progress, it was more difficult still in these days of summer before the harvest came in. That they marched through lands hostile toward the king did not help matters any. Although the former kingdom of Varre was by right of succession under Henry’s rule, the number of recalcitrant nobles and reluctant church leaders in Varre amazed even Liath, who had long ago gotten used to being an outsider.
Yet despite the hardships, she was as content as she could be. She had food, most of the time, and such shelter as a wagon or tent awning afforded. She was free. For now, it was enough.
The camp sprawled in a ragged half circle around a wooden palisade, the outer ring of Lady Svanhilde’s fortress. The two siege engines and three ballistas sat just out of range of an arrow’s shot from the wall; hastily dug ditches protected their flanks, and a wall of mantelets shielded the men who guarded and worked the machines. On either side of the mantelets a picket of stakes stood, protecting the camp from a charge of cavalry. The first line of mud-streaked tents, some listing under the weight of rain puddles caught in canvas, stood somewhat back from these stakes, and the tents of nobles and king yet farther back, almost into the trees. The patchwork of tents and wagons left many gaps and wide stretches of open ground, but Henry had been careful to avoid trampling the ripening fields. He needed grain to feed his retinue.
Certain of the camp followers had set up stalls or brought wares from nearby villages to sell. Indeed, the army’s camp resembled a large disorganized autumn market more than it did any other army Liath had ever seen.
In Arethousa, a precise order of march prevailed and every tent had its specific site rated in order of proximity to the emperor.
In Andalla, the Kalif had his own compound made of manteletlike frames draped with bright fabric. Only the favored few were allowed inside this compound, and the Kalif himself from his place of seclusion ordered the generals who led his troops into battle.
In that almost fatal passage across the deserts west of Kartiako, so many years ago now, she remembered a silent and deadly army whose robes were the color of sand and who seemed to move as with the wind’s speed and sudden gusting shifts of direction. She and Da and a dozen others were all that had survived of the one hundred souls who had started the trek in a vast caravan. She had been so hungry, and too young truly to understand why there had been no food toward the end of that terrible journey.
Now she stared, caught by the enticing smell of a rack of pig meat roasting over a fire. The robust woman tending it looked her over.
“Any coin?” she demanded. Her accent had the broad Varren lilt. “What do you have to trade?”
Liath shrugged and made to move on.
She had nothing, only her status as a King’s Eagle.
“Here, friend.” A Lion halted beside her. Ragged around the edges of his well-worn tunic, still, he had a friendly smile. “Don’t just walk away. We serve the king, and such as her must feed the king’s servants.”
The woman spit on the ground. “If I feed the king’s servants all that I have, for no return, then I’ll have nothing to feed my own kin.”
“You came to take coin off of us, good woman,” said the Lion with a laugh, “so don’t complain if you must feed those of us who have no coin. We only came here because your Varren lords rebelled against the king’s authority. Otherwise we’d not have been graced with the vision of your beautiful face.”
This was too much. She smiled at his smooth flattery, then recalled her irritation. “It isn’t my fault the nobles quarrel. And it wasn’t Lady Svanhilde that followed the king’s sister, it was her reckless eldest son, Lord Charles. Poor woman. She had only boy children and loved them too well.”
“My mother had only boys,” retorted the Lion, “but we none of us gave her reason to be ashamed. Come now, give this loyal Eagle something to eat.”
Grudgingly, the woman did so, a fresh piece of pork spitted on a twig. The Lion handed her a round of flat bread, coarse flour mixed with a paste of dried berries, their usual rations when all else was gone. It was still warm from baking.
“Thank you,” she said, not quite knowing how to respond to his kindness except to identify herself. “I’m called Liath.”
“I’m known as Thiadbold. You’re the Eagle who rode in from Gent,” he added. “We remember you. Those of us who serve the king, and who don’t have noble kin—” Here he grinned. He had a shock of red hair and part of one ear missing, the lobe sliced cleanly off and healed now into a white dimple. “—must watch out for each other as we may. Will you drink with us?”
The camp of Lions, sited near the king’s tent, was much reduced. The first King Henry had commissioned ten centuries of Lions. In these days, at least five of those centuries served in the eastern marchlands, protecting market cities and key forts from the incursions of the barbarians. Two Lion banners flew at this camp, marking the two centuries who marched with the king. But even considering those men who stood watch at this hour, Liath could not imagine that more than sixty men out of two hundred had survived the final battle with Lady Sabella.
