The Burning Stone (Crown of Stars 3)

They were separated by the press of the crowd as Adelheid came forward to greet Theophanu, as whispered commands raced through the company and they made ready to leave. Somehow she found her horse and, with the aid of an Aostan soldier, mounted, giving the reins into his care. Perhaps it would have been better to walk. She gripped the saddle and prayed; each least shift in the saddle made her back burn; she became quite light-headed. After a long while she realized that she could see the countryside in the gray light of early dawn.

They came to a forking of paths. Rosvita had somehow gotten to the head of the line. She heard a great deal of discussion behind her, and she desperately wished to look behind, but each time she tried to turn in the saddle so much pain tore through her back and shoulders that she literally could not move, and she finally gave up and just sat hunched there, enduring the pain and the awful curiosity, not sure which was worse. At last they moved on, but she could hear at her back a party moving off away from them.

After a while, Brother Fortunatus drew up beside her. “Are you well, Sister?” His expression betrayed his anxiety. “You are not wounded?”

“It is only the infirmity of age, Brother. I’m not accustomed to riding in this rash manner. My back is all a knot.”

“I have a salve that should help you, Sister.”

“What have you saved from the camp?” she demanded. “Where is Brother Constantine?”

He looked too tired to cry. “Brother Constantine took a turn for the worse after you left, Sister. I believe—I must believe—that the worst was over, that he was recovering, but he was simply too weak to be moved when—” Now he faltered. “We had to leave him behind. But I trust that Aostans respect the church and will care for him as God wish Their servants to be cared for.” He pressed a hand against the dust-coated saddlebags draped over the mule’s back, his only possession besides the robe he wore. “But I have your History, Sister, and the Vita of St. Radegundis, and Sister Amabilia’s copy. Such salves and ointments as were near at hand, and your eagle quill pen, neatly wrapped. Everything else we had to abandon.”

“Bless you, Brother.”

“Nay,” he said impatiently. “I was of no use. Princess Theophanu remained calm throughout the disaster, but it is only because of Captain Fulk and his men that we escaped with our lives. They did not let the passing days lull them into somnolence, as the rest of us did. Ironhead’s men are merciless. It is clear to me now that they had long planned to attack our encampment without warning. Indeed, we are lucky that Queen Adelheid chose to lead her escape when she did, or we would all of us have been lost, because I do believe Ironhead had made plans to wipe us out entirely. Only because of the queen’s gambit was he forced to pull many of his forces back to the city. He had already placed men beyond our lines in readiness for a night attack.”

Abruptly, above the ringing of harness and the steady clip-clop of horses and the whine of wind through the rocks, they heard the unmistakable clamor of battle joined.

“What is happening?” Rosvita exclaimed.

“Captain Rikard stayed behind with half of his men to ambush Ironhead and perhaps kill him, if God should favor them. That will buy us time.”

“At the cost of their lives.”

Fortunatus merely shrugged. They pressed on and soon the sounds of battle faded. Rosvita’s awareness contracted to the agonizing throb in her back and the presence of Brother Fortunatus at her side. She stopped seeing the landscape through which they rode. She did not dismount when they came to a spring but gratefully drank the water brought to her by a Wendish soldier in his upturned helmet. The water was warm and the helmet slick with sweat, but she minded neither of these things: it was moist and it gave relief to her dry throat. She was past caring about anything else.

War was a sport for the young. Or was it sport at all, but only the physical manifestation of discontented ambition and youthful boredom? Old women rarely had the energy or the compulsion to ride to war: that was why God had placed them in positions of authority, to rein back the dangerously high spirits of those ruled by lust for material power and wealth, all that which is made of flesh and earth and thus tainted by the hand of the Enemy.

For a long while, as the sun rose higher in the sky, she simply shut her eyes and hung on, accompanied only by the sound of their passage through a ringing, empty countryside. It was hot for autumn. She thought perhaps her throat had become so parched that she would never talk again, but that surely would then allow her to retire from court and, at last, to finish her History of the Wendish people which she had promised to Queen Mathilda so long ago. Was it really five years ago she had made that promise? Had she been so occupied in Henry’s court that she had accomplished so little? Would she ever finish?

“Sister!” She started, gasped at the pain, and became aware that she had dozed off in the saddle. Brother Fortunatus stood beside her, propping her up. “Are you fainting, Sister? Can you walk?”

A soldier stood beside her holding a hunk of dry bread and that same helmet. She had to soak the bread in the water to make it edible, but in the end she got it down and was able to look about, counting their much reduced company: Queen Adelheid, Princess Theophanu, some three dozen Wendish soldiers commanded by Captain Fulk, an equal number of Aostan soldiers, and an assortment of noble companions and clerics and servants numbering about three dozen. Slowly, she became aware of consternation eddying through the ranks. It took her a moment to understand its origin: in the last hour, eight horses, including the queen’s, had come up lame, and they now did not have enough mounts. Two scouts had been sent back down the path to seek news of their pursuers, but neither had returned. They still had oats for the horses but no more food, and for water they were now entirely dependent on such springs and rivulets as they could find.

The bread had given her a bit of strength, and she now saw how cruel the countryside looked, a reddish, crumbling stone warped by wind and time to make great pillars worn smooth into striations as even as if God’s Hand had painted them there and soft cliffs eroded with a hundred tiny cavelets along their faces. There were no trees. Grass and scrubby bushes huddled like lost souls along dry streambeds.

“No!” Adelheid’s voice rang out. She looked as bold as a lioness. “I have lost too much now to give in to Ironhead. He has made it a duel between him and me, and I refuse to surrender or to give up! A short way from here we will leave this path and turn north into the wilderness of Capardia.”

“He will see our tracks,” objected Theophanu, without heat. Rosvita had to admire her. As dusty as they all were, as exhausted, as bereft of hope, Theophanu remained composed and upright, coolly assessing their desperate situation.

“So he will,” replied Adelheid. “But where we will go, it will make no matter because he cannot follow us. Who among you is brave enough to follow me into the haunts of those long dead?”

A sentry waved a flag from the ridge behind them, and word was ferried down from man to man until it reached Adelheid. “He sees Berto riding in our direction, at a gallop.”

“Then one of our scouts returns to us,” said Adelheid with satisfaction.

But suddenly, the sentry left his post and came scrambling down the hill himself at a run, men scattering around him. “Ai, Your Majesty!” he cried. “Berto’s shot in the back by an arrow. I see Ironhead’s banner, and his men. We haven’t much time.”

“And how much time do we have?” asked Theophanu as calmly as if she were asking for a second helping of meat at supper.

“They’ll be on us within an hour like to that sung by the clerics at sunrise.”

They looked then, all of them, to Adelheid, not toward Theophanu.

“Come,” she said decisively. “Brother Amicus knows this country well, for he was fostered here. He will lead us to the convent of St. Ekatarina. There my mother sent me when I was a child and my elder sister had just been abducted and killed by a prince not unlike Ironhead. I lived there in safety for a year while war killed my three older brothers. The nuns won’t turn me away. Come, then! We must hurry!”

Several of them were forced to double up in the saddle, including Rosvita. As they rode in haste along the path, Rosvita sat behind Fortunatus and simply laid her head against his broad back, bonier now, but still substantial. She drifted off; started into wakefulness when they left the main path and headed up into a landscape so weird that for a hallucinatory while she thought they had passed through a magical portal into another world entirely, inhabited by fantastical creatures from another plane of existence: basilisks and dragons, griffins and giants molded from stones. Eight riders remained behind to brush away the mark of their passing and to go on along the main path as a decoy. Brave men, each one. But wasn’t that the way of the soldier? If he served his lady faithfully, he would be rewarded with earthly prosperity if he lived, and when he died, as all must in time, then with a place among the loyal retainers in the Chamber of Light.