Instead, they settled Mother Obligatia in the pair of adjoining rooms—cells, really—where they were herded and shut in. The two chambers were built of stone so cunningly fitted together that it appeared the builders had not needed to use mortar. The floor was dirt, as gritty and dry as the air. Six pallets lined the walls. The second room had four actual beds with rope strung between the posts for a mattress. It was smaller than the first but opened onto a tiny, triangular courtyard where they could take air and sun; this courtyard boasted a high brick wall too high to see over and a single olive tree under whose inadequate shade stood a stone bench. There was not a single other living creature in the courtyard except ants and flies. They couldn’t even hear birds singing.
“Here you will rest until I return to fetch you,” said Sergeant Bysantius to Rosvita. “The monks will care for your needs. I leave as well ten of my men-at-arms as guards. Do not, I pray you, be fearful. I mean you and your companions no harm.”
“A fine sentiment,” said Rosvita when she translated his speech for those who could not understand Arethousan, “but we cannot trust him. We must scout out our surroundings and make ready to escape.”
Yet when Hanna surveyed their company, she knew they had traveled as far as they could. Ruoda and Jehan were so weak it Was a miracle they had come so far, and Jerome and Gerwita had only made it up the trail by stopping to rest every ten paces. All four of them lay on the pallets, utterly exhausted. Even Fortunatus and Heriburg were flagging, even she was, and the old ache in her hip had returned. They hadn’t the strength to run, not now.
For the first ten days they mostly slept, talking little, recovering their strength, with rock and a hard blue sky their only companions. Sister Petra insisted on sitting outside in the direct sunlight until her face was burned and blistered from the sun, and then she suffered under a terrible fever for days.
sed up onto his forearms. He lay on a hillside overlooking a valley a quarter cleared and the rest wooded. A half dozen unseen hearths spun fingers of smoke into the darkening sky. In one clearing a pond faded to a pewter gleam. It was hard to see more detail than this because the sun was setting, the far horizon bathed in an orange-red glow so beautiful that he wept.
4
FOR three days they trudged overland along an old Dariyan road still used by the locals for market traffic, of which they saw little. This was the driest country Hanna had ever seen. Nothing that was truly green grew, only prickly juniper, the ubiquitous olive trees, and so many varieties of thorny shrub or broom that she wondered what they had to protect themselves against besides goats. She and the others soon became coated with a film of dust. Her mouth was always parched. Her lips cracked, and the sun was merciless.
They changed direction, turning east at dawn on the fourth day so that they marched into the rising sun, and for the next three days followed a trickle of water running over rocks which Sergeant Bysantius persisted in calling a river. Every chance she got, she sluiced its waters over her head, neck, hands, and red, swollen, blistered feet until she was streaked with sweat and dirt never completely washed away by the water. Yet for moments at a stretch that cool touch relieved her skin and the headache that continually plagued her.
Where a hole in the ground swallowed the stream, they turned up a defile with jagged, steep-sided hills rising to either side. After two arduous days on a rocky trail, making poor time and less distance, the wagons were left on the path with a guard while Sergeant Bysantius pointed the rest at an impossibly steep trail that led straight up the side of the hill. His soldiers rolled a dozen barrels out of the wagons and with great difficulty lashed them to stout poles and lugged them up. Two other men carried Mother Obligatia on her stretcher up that twisting trail which switched back and forward and back while the rest of them strung out behind, falling farther and farther back. It took hours, or years, before their footsore and exhausted party reached a row of buildings perched on a ledge cut into the cliff face.
“I almost feel that I am home again,” gasped Sister Hilaria with as much of a smile as she could muster. Her lips were bleeding, as were Hanna’s.
Certainly the monastery resembled St. Ekatarina’s in its inaccessibility, high up along the cliff face with a forbidding rock ridge above and only the trail leading up to it. An army might besiege this small settlement to no avail since it possessed, as they discovered, a spring within the walls.
“Quite at home,” added Hilaria, who smelled water when they passed a stairwell cutting down into the rock. “I only need a pair of buckets and a shoulder harness, and I’ll be ready to set to work hauling up water.”
Instead, they settled Mother Obligatia in the pair of adjoining rooms—cells, really—where they were herded and shut in. The two chambers were built of stone so cunningly fitted together that it appeared the builders had not needed to use mortar. The floor was dirt, as gritty and dry as the air. Six pallets lined the walls. The second room had four actual beds with rope strung between the posts for a mattress. It was smaller than the first but opened onto a tiny, triangular courtyard where they could take air and sun; this courtyard boasted a high brick wall too high to see over and a single olive tree under whose inadequate shade stood a stone bench. There was not a single other living creature in the courtyard except ants and flies. They couldn’t even hear birds singing.
“Here you will rest until I return to fetch you,” said Sergeant Bysantius to Rosvita. “The monks will care for your needs. I leave as well ten of my men-at-arms as guards. Do not, I pray you, be fearful. I mean you and your companions no harm.”
“A fine sentiment,” said Rosvita when she translated his speech for those who could not understand Arethousan, “but we cannot trust him. We must scout out our surroundings and make ready to escape.”
Yet when Hanna surveyed their company, she knew they had traveled as far as they could. Ruoda and Jehan were so weak it Was a miracle they had come so far, and Jerome and Gerwita had only made it up the trail by stopping to rest every ten paces. All four of them lay on the pallets, utterly exhausted. Even Fortunatus and Heriburg were flagging, even she was, and the old ache in her hip had returned. They hadn’t the strength to run, not now.
For the first ten days they mostly slept, talking little, recovering their strength, with rock and a hard blue sky their only companions. Sister Petra insisted on sitting outside in the direct sunlight until her face was burned and blistered from the sun, and then she suffered under a terrible fever for days.
They saw only two monks, both of them withered old men as wrinkled as the raisins they sprinkled onto the porridge given to the prisoners twice a day. Neither spoke, not a single word, but one knew herb-craft, and he brought ointments for Sister Petra, a foul brew for those suffering from the cough that relieved their congestion, and a spelt porridge for Mother Obligatia along with sage steeped in wine.
“We must keep up our strength,” said Rosvita one evening in the courtyard after they had finished a noble and astoundingly filling supper of beans stewed with parsnips and fennel.
With the help of Hilaria and Fortunatus, Hanna climbed up onto the top of the wall—and shrieked. The courtyard was carved into the last triangle of the ledge, an acclivity whose bounds were cliff above and below. She hung over the wall, feet drumming on the bricks while Fortunatus held her ankles, and stared straight down into the defile as though the wall became the cliff face. The gulf of air made her dizzy. Dusk swept in from the east; the valley below was already drowned. A fly buzzed by her ear, but she dared not slap at it. So far away that it was only a speck, a hawk glided on the wind. If only they could fly, they could sail right out of here. Then she looked down again, and fear choked her: the whole wall might collapse under her weight and send her plunging.
“We can’t escape by this route. Too steep to climb above, and too steep and too far below.” She kicked out and jumped, landing with knees bent as Fortunatus steadied her. She wiped her hands on her leggings, but they were so dry that she wondered if the dust would adhere permanently to her skin. Her heart was still racing.
“The sun will kill us if we escape without a good store of water,” said Aurea, always practical.
The rest were silent, waiting for Rosvita to speak. Both Gerwita and Heriburg had come down with the cough, but they didn’t suffer from it as badly as Ruoda and Jehan, who were only now beginning to recover the color in their cheeks although they still slept most of the day and night.
“Until we are all strong, I think we must bide here quietly,” said Rosvita at last. “I will ask the guards to allow us to take turns hauling water up from the spring. Surely they tire of performing this task, and it will allow us to gain strength by climbing the stairs with full buckets. When all of us can manage the feat—” She smiled at Mother Obligatia, lying on a pallet beside the open doorway, since it was understood that Obligatia and Petra would be exempt from work. “—then we choose between what opportunities seem open to us. Meanwhile, I will ask the guards if we might obtain quills and ink and a table and bench for writing. As well make good use of the time, if we can.”
5
WITH fewer than fifty picked troops at his back, the boldest and most reckless, Stronghand struck inland, following the hounds. The trail took them east and northeast through northern Salia. The war between the Salian heirs had already ravaged the countryside, but they still fought a dozen skirmishes before they came to a ferry crossing on the banks of a great river which marked the limit of Salian territory.
The Hessi interpreter nodded at the river and the garrison stationed on the far bank.
“That is Vanish country, part of the duchy of Arconia,” Yeshu said. He had spent much of his childhood in Salia under the tutelage of an uncle and knew the country well. “Under the rule of King Henry and his sister Biscop Constance. But those in the garrison are flying the sigil of Duke Conrad. You see? The hawk of Wayland. We heard rumors in Medemelacha that King Henry is dead, or has abandoned the north to linger in the old city of Darre, seduced by dreams of empire. Biscop Constance is said to be a prisoner of her half sister, Lady Sabella. Sabella married her daughter to Duke Conrad. Maybe this is true. I haven’t seen it for myself.”
Hessi merchants liked to see things for themselves before pronouncing them true or false. It was one of the reasons Stronghand found them useful to work with. If he dealt fairly with them and allowed them to expand their trading networks, then they returned a fair profit in information and taxes in exchange.