The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

ords smirched him no less than the rotten fruit, but he could not answer their questions or defend himself. If he spoke at all, the words that poured from him made his audience laugh, or weep.

“We’ll never know peace. What is bound to Earth will return to Earth. The suffering isn’t over!”

“See what a count’s progress this cheat and liar makes now!” called Heric, who had bread every day and a new tunic for his reward as well as the pleasure of accompanying the cage as it made its rounds through villages and farms that at times seemed familiar to him although he could put no name to anything if it were not spoken within his hearing. The only name he remembered was Adica’s. She was dead.

His only companions were rage and sorrow, invisible but always crouched at his side, and the shackles bound him close against them. He could never escape.

At least the rivers of blood had stopped flowing.

“Yet blood will cover us again,” he said to the villagers as he tried to blink away the glare of the sun. He had to make them understand even though there was nothing they could do to save themselves. “The cataclysm is coming. She set it in motion. She didn’t know what she was doing. She did know, but she couldn’t have understood. I loved her. She couldn’t have wished harm on so many.”

She couldn’t have.

No matter how many times he said it, he knew he would never know.

Because of the chains, he could not wipe dust from his eyes. Tears ran constantly as the dirt of the road was kicked up into his face. His tongue tasted of grit. Now and again they gave him porridge poured onto the floorboards of the wagon so he had to kneel and lap it up while curious folk watched and whispered. Once a child threw the end piece of a moldy cheese at him, and he barely caught it and wolfed it down even though it was so hard it was like eating rocks. Even apples rotted to a brown mush inside the soft skin were welcome. He picked the skins off the bed of the wagon where they had splattered. He drank rain, licking it from his hands.

“He’s no better than a wild beast!” said Heric. “Yet this creature claimed kinship to our noble count! For shame! For shame that any of you once bowed before him!”

Fear shamed them. He saw right into their hearts. They were afraid of their new lord, the one they called Geoffrey, yet they feared his raving words and filthy appearance even more and so they hated him. He spoke aloud of the terror that slept within each one, songs of despair whose melody was the end of the world.

They believed him but did not want to. He heard their murmurs as they spoke among themselves of the harbingers that had plagued them for the last few years, ever since the lamentable death of the old count. Troubles beset them with refugees on the road and children starving and holy fire burning their limbs and plague rife in the south, so rumor had it, and the harvest blighted and the storms as fierce as any in living memory with hailstones so large they destroyed houses and lightning that had burned down a church and untimely snows in late spring which caught travelers and householders and shepherds unprepared.

They believed him, and therefore they cursed him. Lord Geoffrey rode into each village in his wake with his young daughter beside him, and they bowed and genuflected before the young countess and pledged their oaths, because Geoffrey was better than the end of the world.

“No one will escape,” he said to the air.

“Especially not you!” crowed Heric, and the guardsman called to the carter who controlled the reins. “Here, now, Ulf! Time to move on! We’ve a long way to go today before you and I will get our feast and a longer way to go before the usurper gets his fill of his just reward.”

The wagon lurched forward as Ulf the carter got the oxen moving. They jounced down a forest path. The leaves of the trees had begun to turn to gold and orange, and as the wind rattled through the branches, leaves spun loose and danced in eddies and spirals. Ahead, Heric called out. The wagon jolted to a stop in a clearing carved out of the woodland where stood half a dozen wattle-and-daub huts roofed with sod. Fences ringed vegetable gardens, each one neatly tended although most looked recently harvested. A stand of rosemary flowered; a few parsnips remained in the ground. A score of ragged folk stared as Heric launched into his tirade and the other guardsmen poked at him with sticks to emphasize Heric’s words.

“… claimed to be the son of the count, but it was all a lie…. God have punished him … found as a madman roaming the countryside stealing a deacon’s bread and trying to murder a girl … no better than a beast.”

A woman stepped out of the crowd, holding tightly to the hand of a small child. She was thin and wasted, and the child was not much more than skin stretched over bone, but both had a fierce will shining in their expressions, not easily cowed by Heric and his arrogant companions. Strangely, although she dressed in rags like the rest of the villagers, she wore over all a sumptuous fur-lined cloak more fitting to a lord than a pauper. It was this cloak that gave her authority among the others. It was this cloak that made his eyes burn, and his head reel.

“We know what you are about,” she said to Heric with the calm contempt of a woman who, having stood at the edge of the Abyss and survived, no longer fears worldly threats. “Leave us, I pray you. Do not mock us by this display. We know who walks among us. We know who he is.”

Some of them wept, and their compassion silenced him. He did not condemn himself by babbling but only watched as Heric angrily swore at the carter and got the procession moving again down the forest path. The trees closed in around them. The hamlet was lost as if it had never existed, and maybe it hadn’t. Maybe it was just a vision, not real at all. His head hurt. In the distance he heard the rumble of thunder that heralded a gathering storm.

XXX

THE NATURE OF THEIR POWER

1

“I pray you, Sister Rosvita.”

Rosvita started awake. “I dozed off,” she said, brushing a fly off her cheek. The warmth of the sun soaked into her back, which ached from lying on the ground. Despite the late date—by her calculations, it was the ninth of Octumbre—the sun glared ungodly hot. Beneath her body the earth trembled. Horses neighed. Dogs barked. As the noise subsided, a stillness sank over them, as taut as a drawn bowstring. There was no wind.

“That was a little stronger than the others,” said Ruoda, but there was an odd tone in her words, a warning.

Rosvita sat up. Her little company sat like rabbits caught under the glare of an eagle, all but Mother Obligatia, who lay beneath the shelter of the awning on a pallet. The old abbess was also aware, raised up on one elbow to watch. Hanna stood beside her with her gaze fixed on the five men waiting at the edge of their little encampment, one of whom was the one-eyed general, Lord Alexandros, wearing a handsome scarlet tabard and, under it, a coat of mail. He did not speak. Such an exalted man had servants to speak for him.

“Sister Rosvita.” Sergeant Bysantius inclined his head respectfully.

“General Lord Alexandros requests the attendance of the Eagle at his tent.”

“Very well,” said Rosvita, knowing they had no way to protest if the general chose to drag Hanna off by force. “I will go with her.”