“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.”