The Book of Earth

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  Rose uncurled, massaging her temples in relief. “Is he always like that? How do you listen without burning your brain out?”

  “You can hear him? You can hear the dragon? You can hear what he . . . ?” Hal foundered midway between pride and hopeless envy.

  “Not very well.” Rose shook her head as if clearing it. “Not very well at all. Mostly his enormous power. It was how I imagine a god would speak.” She regarded Erde with new respect. “Child, you have a remarkable gift.”

  “She is the Dragon Guide,” Hal reminded her simply.

  “Will you introduce me?” Rose asked Erde. “Perhaps we can learn a way to talk together in a less painful fashion.”

  The new deference in Rose’s rich and wonderful voice made Erde self-conscious. She wasn’t sure she deserved it. After all, it was the dragon who was remarkable, not she. But it was interesting to think about what it meant to be able to do something other people couldn’t do. There was a kind of power in that, especially if it was something other people wanted to be able to do.

  —Dragon, this is Rose of Deep Moor. She has a great hearing gift. I think if you think very small and quietly, she might be able to understand you. This might be useful right now, since she has a working voice, and could translate for you.

  Earth blinked again and turned his huge eyes on Rose in a deeply speculative gaze. Erde saw faint flickers in her mind, little whispers of image, but Rose smiled and sighed as if she’d been given the most wonderful treasure.

  “Can you hear him?” Hal demanded. “What does he say?”

  “He doesn’t exactly say . . . anything.”

  Hal nodded sagely, fighting to keep his envy in check. “No words. That’s what she told me.”

  “He greets me, and you, the women of the circle. He’s very polite. But there is something he’s eager to tell us . . .”

  New images ghosted into Erde’s mind, appearing slowly like the sun through a mist. The scale was small, the colors were bland, but she recognized the Mage City, a pale echo of itself.

  Rose inhaled sharply. “It’s the city, the one you showed me! He says he knows where it is!”

  The women exclaimed softly. Doritt let out a small cheer.

  Then Esther said, “Listen!”

  On the night wind came an insistent clanging, from the direction of the farmstead.

  “The alarm bell!” breathed Doritt.

  “It must be Lily and Margit come home,” said Raven, “wondering where we are.”

  Rose raised her face to the breeze like a wary animal. “Oh, this is the darkness I’ve felt all day. It’s Lily, and she brings us bad news.”

  The circle broke instantly. Raven and Doritt scrambled up and took off down the dark hill at a run. The twins made quick arrangements for the return of the dogcart, and sped after them.

  “Margit is the twins’ birth-mother,” Linden told Erde nervously as she helped the old lore-keepers into the cart. Hal had promised to pull them home so the others could hurry ahead. Rose thanked him gravely, then moved into his arms for the offered embrace.

  His lips brushed her forehead. “All will be well, Rosie.”

  “No, my love, it won’t. Not anymore.” Rose pressed her face briefly into his chest. “Deep Moor’s grace time is over, I feel it. The world has come to our doorstep. I only hope we’ve not waited too long to act.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Earth spent the whole trip down the hill babbling to Erde about his discovery. It wasn’t exactly true that he knew where the Mage City was—Rose had misunderstood some of the finer details. But lying out in the meadow enjoying himself after a satisfying meal, he had heard the Summoner’s voice for the first time while he was awake, in his head, not like a real sound, but the voice was now directional. It drew him like a lodestone. He was sure he could follow it to its source which, of course, was the city.

  Erde told him what Rose had said about the city. He took this as further proof, which she would have been inclined to do also, were the Mage City not her own invention. She felt too deeply mired in her “righteous lie” to see a way out of it. Besides, she did have to wonder about what Rose had seen. Perhaps she had not made it up. Perhaps the image of the Mage City had come into her mind from somewhere else, from someone else. Once again, she decided to say nothing of this to the dragon. Even a fantasy destination was better than no destination at all.

  * * *

  The yard in front of the house was deserted when Hal and Erde reached the farmstead. The lanterns burned in scattered groups on the porch where they’d been hastily abandoned. The lore-keepers looked grim.

  “All inside, I suspect,” said one. The other hung a lantern to either side of the door, then blew the rest out and replaced them neatly in their rack. Erde left the dragon pacing impatiently in the yard. She followed Hal into the house.

  Inside, oil lamps flared around the stone hearth, where the women were gathered. A young woman lay bleeding in Raven’s arms, struggling to speak while Linden sponged her wounds. Her clothing was torn and mud-spattered. Rose knelt alongside, holding the woman’s limp hand and bending close to hear her broken whisper.

  Doritt caught Hal’s arm as he came up beside her. Her big dark eyes glimmered with unshed tears. “Margit’s been taken!”

  “What! Where?”

  “Erfurt,” she hissed. “Lily’s run back all the way alone.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She’ll be all right.”

  “Who got Margit?”

  “Adolphus of Köthen.”

  “Of . . . Köthen? Köthen?”

  Doritt nodded. “I’m sorry, Hal.”

  “Köthen in Erfurt?”

  “He’s leading the barons’ army.”

  Hal seemed to wish he hadn’t heard her right. “What about the king?”

  “The king has fled.”

  His only response was a soft moan.

  “Toward Nürnburg, with a few of his household. Prince Carl stayed with Köthen.”

  “Willingly?”

  “Willingly.”

  Erde watched the knight’s entire body reel under this last piece of news. In their month together, she had never seen his manner go so hard and cold, and yet somehow so sad. “Köthen always did have an abnormal influence over the boy. Is Margit alive?”

  Doritt’s mouth tightened. “So far. We don’t have a lot of details yet, but Lily’s afraid that Baron Köthen will use Margit to prove his loyalty when Fra Guill arrives next week to give his blessing to the barons’ coup.”

  “The hell-priest in Erfurt, too? Oh, too close, Doritt, too close for comfort. I hope Lily covered her trail.”

  Doritt looked offended. “Lily’s our most gifted Seeker. Of course she covered her trail.”

  “Erfurt taken. The king’s own seat.” Hal glanced about furtively as if he were being held against his will. “I must get to Nürnburg. I must get to His Majesty.”

  “What about Margit? You know he’ll burn her, Hal.”

  “She knew the risk, as we all do. My duty is with the king.”

  Doritt looked away, frowning, then nodded. “And Margit would surely agree. Will you leave the girl and her creature with us?”

  His nod was businesslike. “They’re safer here than anywhere.”

  Erde grabbed his sleeve and shook her head.

  “Milady, please understand. Speed is essential now.”

  She was sure from his posture that he was about to explain how this was men’s work ahead of him. She searched about, found a scrap of Raven’s paper in her pocket. EARTH WILL NOT STAY. HE IS CALLED.

  “Ah, yes,” agreed Doritt. “He’s on his own quest, after all. They’ll just go off on their own without you.”

  “And Fra Guill will have them in a blink of an eye. Ah, sweet Mother, help me. What do I do?” Hal paced away and back. “King or Dragon? Must I choose?”

  Erde wrote: WE’LL ALL GO TO NÜRNBURG.

  “Milady, our little walk in the woods has just beco
me infinitely more dangerous.”

  She nodded, once and briskly.

  “Rose’s Seeing proves you’ve still a ways to go together,” Doritt pointed out.

  “He moves too slowly! He’s like a snail!”

  HE’LL MOVE FASTER, Erde promised.

  Because the knight did not refuse her outright, she knew that the session up on the hill had changed something fundamental in his thinking about her and the dragon, a change she sensed in her own thinking as well. New sensations of confidence and potential were spreading through her like slow warmth, a growing need to act, to stand against the evil tide of events rather than be swept along by it. She had fallen in with this loose network of royalists by accident, if there was any such thing as accident (which she was beginning to doubt), but they were her natural allies. Her enemies were their enemies. Most importantly, she had a notion that the dragon was also readying himself to act. She had no idea what form his action might take, but as Dragon Guide, she might well influence his choice.

  She had a strange moment of self-awareness, as if she were standing across the room looking back. She saw a tall young woman with a ruddy boyish face and determined jaw, strong and lean from travel and the knight’s training exercises, clothed in a man’s pragmatic garb. The sallow longhaired child in slippers and velvet dresses was a fading memory. Her mouth twisted with reflective irony. She’d become what she’d always pretended to be in her fantasies, what her father had always feared and despised. Interesting that it had required the sacrifice of her entire life as she’d known it to accomplish the transformation.

  Possessed by this new self as if by some benign but reckless demon, Erde grinned at Hal and scrawled: WE’LL SAVE THE KING TOGETHER.

  Hal squeezed his eyes shut once, then nodded helplessly.

  PART FOUR

  The Meeting with Destiny

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  She promised him haste, and he got it. With twelve women bending their efforts to it, the provisioning was quickly accomplished. Food, a skin of wine, a new linen shirt for Erde and her old one clean. Presents, too, casually produced and packed away as if they’d been hers all along. There were warm gloves and new stockings from the fine wool of Doritt’s sheep. Rose gave her a thin rectangle of slate pierced by a thong, and a soft pointed stick that made bright letters on the gray stone. This gift Erde hung gratefully around her neck, but not before scrawling THANK YOU on it in large letters.

  Hal hunted up a leather breastplate and greaves that he’d left behind on some past visit. He stowed them in the mule packs along with a borrowed supply of extra woolens. Erde touched his arm in question as he was stuffing them into an already full pouch.

  “Rose says we’ll need these.” He closed the pack briskly and tied the thongs. Then he went to draw Rose aside from the women crowding around the loaded mule. He said his good-byes and Erde said hers. They were on the road before the moon had set.

  Raven and Doritt came out with them as far as the oak grove. They walked arm in arm beside Hal, their mood somber. The dragon did not share their foreboding. He was as eager as if the Summoner awaited him right outside the valley. He forged off like a happy hunting dog through the tall grasses to the right and left of the track, vanishing into the darkness and then returning to report to Erde on the beauty of the night and the interesting smells to be had out in the meadow.

  Meanwhile, under the steady pressure of Raven’s persuasion, Hal reconsidered his itinerary.

  “Nürnburg is a week’s hard ride,” he grumbled, “Never mind what it will take with this group. The king on the road, exposed and vulnerable . . . what if Köthen’s sent men in pursuit?”

  “But Erfurt’s on the way,” she reminded him. “A swing up there won’t add more than a day.”

  “If all goes well.” Hal sighed as if bullied and over-matched. “Well, let’s say we do it. Four or five days to Erfurt, then I slip in quickly by night. We must still have a loyal source or two who could help me find Margit. All right. If I’m not too late, I’ll do what I can.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “No,” he admitted gloomily. “It wouldn’t.”

  Raven put her arm around his waist and leaned into him gratefully. Doritt’s brisk, serious nod said she didn’t hold out too much hope, but she was relieved that he would try.

  “I hope they won’t have taken her crucifix,” murmured Raven. Doritt muttered sympathetic agreement but Hal shook his head.

  “Pray she’ll not endanger her soul with that.”

  “Don’t be so disapproving,” Raven chided. “You know the same Church that makes such prohibitions is the Church that’s burning innocent women. Would you begrudge our Margit a quick and comfortable passing?”

  “Pray there’ll be no need,” Hal repeated primly.

  Raven released her arm and stood away from him. “Heinrich, are you really a man to whom the law means more than human life?”

  “Not man’s law. I’d deliver the grace stroke myself, were murder the only way to save her the agony of the stake. But we’re talking here of God’s Law.” He shrugged delicately, as if embarrassed by his own obstinance. “I do truly believe it’s a sin to take one’s own life.”

  “It’s men who’ve decided what God’s Law is,” Raven returned. “What if they were about to burn you?”

  Erde, who’d been listening mystified, saw it all in a bright and sickening rush: some fast-acting poison from Linden’s stores of herbs and elixirs, a tiny lethal reservoir inside the crucifix. She’d heard of such things in the bard tales. It was a once remote and romantic notion that now seemed pragmatic and humane. Surely it was not a sin to save yourself from suffering a prolonged torture? She wished the witch-woman in Tubin had had such an option. She was surprised that Hal could be dogmatic about suffering, especially when he had seen so much of it.

  But on the other hand, Raven’s reply did amount to outright heresy. Every good Christian knew that God had decided God’s Laws.

  The birds were just stirring in the oak trees as they reached the grove. Their early songs hung crystalline in the still air. The heady sweet scents of fern and wet leaves were like fairy voices begging Erde to stay. She knew she would, were it not for the dragon. She was probably mad, having found such a wonderful place, to be leaving it so quickly.

  Hal squinted through the branches toward the lightening sky. “We’ll travel till dawn, then rest until dark. I want to get well clear of this valley in case we’re noticed.”

  Raven took the late rose she’d worn in her hair and laid it on the stone cairn by the pool in the middle of the grove. “For your safety this day and those to come,” she intoned. She took Hal’s hands. “Find our Margit.” Then she kissed him and embraced Erde, turning away briskly with tears in her eyes. Erde found her own suddenly wet.

  “Come, Doritt. Let them be on their way.”

  “Yes, yes, soon enough.” Doritt shook hands around, finishing with a firm pat on Erde’s shoulder. “We’ve not seen the last of you, girl. Don’t fret.”

  Raven was already lost in the shadows. “Is that a true notion, Doritt?” she called.

  The tall woman nodded. “You can count on it.”

  * * *

  “Well, that’s encouraging,” remarked Hal as they approached the steep switchbacks leading out of the valley. “Doritt’s notions are her gift. She gets them about how things will turn out. Not like Rose’s Seeing what is, much vaguer and long-term. She doesn’t get them very often and she can’t call them up—they just arrive, or they don’t. But Deep Moor swears by her.”

  They found the dragon at the foot of the cliff, stock-still, staring upward. When Erde asked him what he was looking at, she received his blank-mind state, the same as she did when he was being invisible. Several times, he glanced at the base of the trail, then back at the top of the cliff, a good half-mile above.

  Erde pulled out her new writing slate. HE WON’T TALK TO ME.

  Hal laughed. “You know how
he hates to climb. He’s wishing he had wings, like a proper dragon.”

  As they stood watching the dragon stare intently upward, the first pink of dawn flushed the mountain range to the west. Hal sent the mule and the she-goat up the trail.

  “We must be moving. If you go ahead, he’ll follow.”

  Which he did, but with a puzzled, distracted air. Erde sent him a wistful image of himself with sleek reptilian wings, soaring toward the cliff top. His response was the closest thing to a chuckle she’d heard out of him yet: a vision of himself with his tongue lolling ridiculously. It was her first clue that he knew what humor was.

  —You thought I was making a joke?

  He returned assent and a new image: himself decked out with giant bird wings, flapping and panting, but unable to lift his massive body off the ground. Then he showed her how wings large enough to lift his weight would be too cumbersome to carry around on the ground. Erde thought this was unimaginative thinking for a mythic creature such as a dragon. She wrote out the conversation laboriously for Hal on her slate.

  “Dragons,” he offered seriously, “er . . . winged dragons are said to have hollow bones made of magical substances that cause them to weigh nothing at all.”

  Erde made a face. NOT THIS DRAGON.

  “No,” the knight mourned. “Apparently not.”

  Earth had more to say on the subject of travel. He’d been thinking about it a lot, but the results were hard to express in visual images. He’d become convinced that knowledge of an easier way lurked just beyond the edges of his memory. Because she knew how miserable and inadequate he felt when his memory failed him, Erde concentrated on soothing his frustration, simply to keep him going up the hill. She asked about the Summoner. Earth told her the voice came and went. It was not as constant in his waking existence as it was in the dream, but he was confident he would hear it soon again, and know which way to go. Erde hoped it would be in the direction of Erfurt and Nürnburg.

  The air cooled noticeably as they climbed. Erde recalled the torn but heavy layers of clothing that Lily had arrived in, and the woolens that Rose had made Hal bring along. She thought of the mud and chill of her journey from Tor Alte, and stole many backward yearning glances at the receding valley. She’d hoped to stay a while, to sleep in a warm soft bed again and wake rested to the sound of birdsong and the comfortable chatter of women.