The Gathering Storm
Page 119

Captain Ulric stepped to one side, the better to display his prisoners. “Another party of heretics brought to the gate, Your Highness.”
“Lord save us,” whispered Gerulf, who was kneeling so closely behind Ivar that one of his knees had ridden uncomfortably up on Ivar’s toes. “What’s that traitor doing sitting in the seat of judgment?”
2
THEY followed the defile by the light of a full moon. The play of shadows across the rock and the daunting silence made the landscape ominous, but they had to keep going. “Not much farther now.”
Hanna had a hard time understanding their guide; the Aostan spoken in Darre seemed to have little to do with the language spoken in this God-forsaken region, although they were supposedly the same tongue.
“I recognize the path,” said Fortunatus. He held the reins of the mule on which Sister Rosvita rode.
“I do not, except as snatches of a dream,” replied Rosvita.
“You were very ill last time we came this way.”
“Journey in haste, repent in leisure,” she agreed, glancing back down the narrow track the way they had come. They were hemmed in by rock faces sculpted by God’s hands into terrible visages that glowered over them. “We seem fated to travel here with enemies at our heels.”
Hanna also looked back along the trail. It was too dark to see anything beyond their line of march: the three girls behind her, then Jerome and Jehan leading a goat, and, last, the servant woman, Aurea, with Hanna’s staff gripped in her hands. In daylight, the dust of a large troop of horsemen would give away the position of those who followed them, but at night they had to rely on other stratagems. She fingered the amulet of protection she wore around her neck. Woven by Heriburg from fennel and the withered flowers of noble white, these were all that had allowed them to come so far without being spied out by the Holy Mother and her council of sorcerers.
Jehan coughed, echoed by Ruoda, a hacking cough that rose from her chest. Sickness dogged them, too.
“Here.” The old guide halted, whistling softly. A thrown pebble snapped on the track in front of him, and in its wake a boy scrambled out of the rocks. The child had the family nose, beaked and noble if overlarge on such a small face, and the wiry build common to the countryfolk in this desolate region.
The boy babbled too swiftly for Hanna to catch more than a few words, but Rosvita listened intently before turning to the others, who crowded up behind her.
“The child says that there are twenty horsemen an hour or more behind us, led by a lord so handsome that some in the village wonder if he might be an angel and we the demons he’s been sent by God to pursue.”
“How did they find us?” demanded Heriburg. “We should have remained hidden from them. We have the amulets, and we used every means of misdirection.”
“Yet these were evidently not enough.” Rosvita lifted a hand to silence her. “Perhaps they picked up our trail at the village. It no longer matters. We must hurry if we hope to reach the convent before they catch us.”
They kept going. They had very little left except their determination. At the last village they had traded the handcart in exchange for the old man’s services as a guide. It was the only thing of worth they had left. The mare had gone lame and they had sold the mule for food. The last of the coins brought by Fortunatus had gone days ago to buy a milking goat, grain, and wine. They had nothing now except the clothes and cloaks on their backs, the precious books, Hanna’s staff, bow, quiver, and knife, and three eating knives shared out between the rest of them. Even the blankets had been traded for quinces, porridge, and a stock of dried fish, now eaten.
The moon set behind the western highlands as dawn lit the eastern hills. In this half light, as inconstant as hope, they cut to the right along the gully and found themselves on a flat field running up to the base of a vast cone of upthrust rock that loomed like the hammer of God before them.
Stumps of trees and patches of dry scrub gave the ground a leprous appearance. No birds sang. Where the valley broadened, it snaked back around either side of the huge outcropping, but the steep hills on either side quickly closed back in. Shadows still filled the valley. There was no sign of life.
“My God,” said Hanna. She thought her legs would give out. “Are you sure someone lives up there?”
“I am sure.”
Dismounting to stand at the foot of the cliff, Rosvita shouted out. No one answered.
She shouted again. They waited. Wind teased the rock. Above, a pale scrap fluttered where a narrow ledge stuck out from the cliff face, but Hanna could not quite make out what it was. No one answered. There was no way up that precipitous slope.