In the Eye of Heaven Part 12

The duke's party scattered the carrion birds in the courtyard round the high sanctuary. A thousand black-beaded eyes stared down from every roost. As the party climbed into the keep itself, Durand felt Gol's soldiers all around him.

A Rook popped into the arch at the top of the entry stair. The men stopped as the Rook grinned down.

"Your Grace," he said, and bowed with a flourish so low that the sleeve of his robe licked the threshold. "Where is my son?" said the duke. "In your feasting hall, Your Grace. He expects you." The duke made no answer, and they pressed on into the feasting hall, Durand counting eight more of Gol's men. Some smiled at him. Every one was armed. Radomor had not left his father's throne. The duke stood before his son as he had stood before Gol's soldiers at Mantlewell. "My son."

"Father." Radomor did not move. "Where are the bells of the high sanctuary?" Radomor said nothing, though his two Rooks shared a knowing smile. "I have come about Alwen and the boy," the duke said.

"Yes.""Yes. I must see them."

The duke's guard were wise enough to have their hands on their blades. "That will be difficult, father."

The duke's head turned an inch. "Tell me I am not too late."

One of the Rooks spoke out: "Oh no. Not too late. Not the way you imagine. He has been advised to relent. He has been told it was wrong of him to keep them here, but you must understand that he was angry. Alwen wished to leave Ferangore. The country seemed a better place. She could let the scandal pa.s.s. Lord Radomor's impulse was to contain the news, but this man, Durand, made him see that it would be difficult."

The duke returned his gaze to Radomor."Where is she now?" he asked.

Another Rook answered. "She is traveling to her dower lands in Gireth."

"And the boy?" asked the duke. "My grandson?"Now Radomor answered. "He is with her, father.""Then we will go to her.""You may do as you wish.""Yes, my son, and you will come with me."

Now, Radomor stood. Durand looked for rage or triumph in the man's features but found nothing there he could understand. Then Radomor's eyes turned on him, dark as lodestones.

DURAND KNEW THEY must be dead. must be dead.

They rode east as though Alwen and her baby might be waiting. It was a game, or the last verse of some skald's saga. Durand couldn't see the end, but he could not stop. He ma.s.saged his hand. Until the game was over, there was still a chance that he had killed no one, and it would all end. But he wished he'd stuck with Heremund in Tormentil.

Armed men surrounded him. There were two parties: knights, soldiers. They glared under the ornate brows of iron helms, eyeing each other with the tight attention of wolves and dogs.

"Here." Duke Ailnor stopped the column as the Eye of Heaven sank below the hills behind them. Daylight's twelve hours were gone, and now a hill rose in the gloom, swathed in ferns and long gra.s.s. It looked to have a high flat top. The duke pointed toward the crest, and they rode for it, ready to make camp. Durand could not argue. He had to sleep. It was no longer a matter of will.

At the top, the party stared over a wide, dark river. To Durand's surprise, he knew the place. This was the Banderol. It had been his road from Acconel, and he had waded it to follow Radomor's train. He must have seen this hill.

Duke Ailnor joined Durand at the ridge, saying nothing. His gray eyes were on the shadowed lands beyond the river: Gireth.

Men were climbing from their saddles, dropping into the gra.s.s. As Durand rested on horseback with the duke, too tired for courtesy, the Rooks took the chance to approach, half-bowing as they cringed forward.

"An intriguing stopping-place you've chosen, Your Grace," said one, peering up. The man's gaze fell on a cl.u.s.ter of standing stones nearby: lichenous slabs rising from nests of small boulders. There were sockets of darkness caught between, places that must have been chambers. "Very intriguing indeed."

Duke Ailnor made no answer.

"Oh," the second Rook said. He fished in his gardecorps, grinning up at Durand. "I think I have something here for you." With a flourish like a conjurer, the little man drew a long blue rag from his robe. As Durand's stomach lurched, the Rook jabbed the rag into Durand's palm and pa.s.sed a hand by Durand's ear. "And what have we here?" With another flourish, he produced a small smooth stone. Just the thing for shying at crows. "Don't worry, my friend. They are yours now. You may keep them."

The two men bowed once more and said, "Your Grace." Durand remembered the boy.

Before settling, Radomor and his henchmen had taken themselves off a couple of dozen paces. The duke's steed nodded.

"It is an old place," Ailnor said. He didn't ask about the rag. "Your Grace," Durand agreed.

"These stones. Tombs from the days before the Cradle's Cradle's landing. They say Gireth was named for a tribe. Savages stealing among the birches as Cellogir the Pilot sailed into the Bay of Acconel. You can see it in the villagers even now, I fancy. That knowing silence." landing. They say Gireth was named for a tribe. Savages stealing among the birches as Cellogir the Pilot sailed into the Bay of Acconel. You can see it in the villagers even now, I fancy. That knowing silence."

Durand knotted the boy's sling round his fist, not in so mystical a mood. From what he had seen, plowmen knew hards.h.i.+p. It had likely been the same all those winters ago.

"Your people are from Gireth, yes?" the duke said.

"Yes, Your Grace. My father holds the Col of the Blackroots."

"Ah. An old line. Like mine. s.h.i.+pmates, maybe, on Saerdan's Cradle. Cradle. What do you think?" What do you think?"

"I would not guess, Your Grace." Ailnor's line was Saerdan's.

"Bloodlines matter. We Sons of Atthi. The wise women, the wellborn, we breed our children like horses. But they matter." The old man's eyes were on the camp across the hill. "If not in the ways most imagine."

He nudged his mount a step forward, his long beard and hair flas.h.i.+ng as cold as silver. "Do you know this hill, boy?"

"No, Your Grace."

'They call it the 'Fetch Hollow.' They can see it from the Banderol. There was a battle." He stopped. "Somewhere here ..." He was looking downhill, toward the river. "I can hardly make it out. We are standing on the great bend of a horseshoe. The two points swing down for the river. Between is the Hollow. It's a ravine, full of oaks." Durand thought he could make out the place. "Some ancestor of ours drove an army into that ravine, and a skald will tell you that no one came out. There was a monastery, as well, later and for a thousand winters, right where we are standing, but it burned."

"Our lines were old even then."

With a familiar nod of his chin, the duke swung down from the saddle. Durand followed. "When they have all bedded down, I want you to get away." Durand had not expected this. "I must play out this game. As long as there is any hope, I must go on. I cannot give up my grandson. But you. You are young yet, and I fear my son will not permit you to live. You were not meant to survive this long, I think, and some way will be found. Perhaps that cur Gol will come smiling to breakfast, saying he caught you trying to run off. Perhaps he'll kill one of my men and put the knife in your hand. My son is proud, and you have run across his land carrying tales of his shame."

The duke looked over the camp. Somewhere, he could see Lord Radomor.

"They say he led the vanguard of the king's army. On the first day, Borogyn and his Heithans surged down upon the king's men like a sea. My son and his vanguard held them back but at great cost. Heroes. On the second day, King Ragnal held the vanguard in reserve. They were to recover. Radomor was wounded. So many were dead. But the battle s.h.i.+fted. The Heithans ground hard. They drove a slow advance against the king. Borogyn seemed ready to turn the line, and so, I am told, my son rose from his sickbed and threw his broken vanguard at their heart. They struck deep and drove themselves deeper. Ten men died for every step, but they reached Borogyn-or Radomor did-and hamstrung the Heithan advance. Borogyn's young princes turned coat. But so many died. All of Radomor's men.

"My boy lost himself in that battle. He is gone," the old man concluded. "I still remember when my wife was alive. The future was so very different then."

"Your Grace," said Durand. "I don't know if it is my place, but a messenger came from Beoran. They are trying to move your son to treason."

The long shadow of their hilltop stretched leagues into Gireth. Ailnor said nothing.

"You are in danger" Durand pressed.

The ancient lord looked Durand in the eye. His voice was a rattle.

"When they sleep," he said. "Take the Hollow down. I think they will not follow."

THAT NIGHT, D DURAND dreamt of blood. The whole hilltop covered in it. Thick. His hands came away as if caught in pitch. He heard clas.h.i.+ng weapons. Someone was whispering. The syllables wound around each other, coiling and uncoiling in the dark. dreamt of blood. The whole hilltop covered in it. Thick. His hands came away as if caught in pitch. He heard clas.h.i.+ng weapons. Someone was whispering. The syllables wound around each other, coiling and uncoiling in the dark.

But he woke into stillness. He picked out a pair of sentries on either side of the camp. It was time. First, he must get a few things together. He knew well how far a man got with no money and no supplies.

The baggage bulked under a tarp behind Duke Ailnor's pavilion. Durand padded quietly past sleeping men and horses before scrounging for a couple of loaves and a wedge of cheese. Most important, though, was the iron roll of armor he had salvaged from the barracks hall at Ferangore. He had lugged it for leagues, and was still not ready to leave it and all it meant behind, though part of him wondered at his greed in keeping the thing.

The two parties had tied the horses in a sort of trough between the camps, right above the Hollow. Keeping the touchy animals between the camps was like keeping geese in the yard, the poor man's subst.i.tute for a guard dog. Durand set his gear down and began the awkward job of picking his nag from the rest. Horses nodded and spluttered, identical in the dark. He tried to keep his attention fixed on the task at hand and soon spotted a swaybacked brute that looked familiar.

"Durand," said a voice, close. said a voice, close.

Like a knife, the word stuck in his back. Shadows rose from the gra.s.s as men stepping out from behind horses.

He jerked the dagger from his belt.

"Brave," the voice said: Lazar Gol. A glance revealed five, or maybe seven, others. Durand called upon Heaven.

"But brave'11 do you no good," Gol said.

Durand prayed again. There was nothing for it. He couldn't beat Gol alone. With another half-dozen men thrown in, he wouldn't even get a chance to shout.

They moved.He bolted.

In an instant, he had rolled under his stolen horse and was up, blocking and dodging like a plowman in a football match. The horses made a tangle of invisible ropes and a barricade of bodies. He cut and dodged, making for his gear on his way to the ravine. He saw a white face and mashed the heel of his hand in the middle, and then he had his bundle and was plunging into the steep-sided ravine called the Hollow.

Almost at once, he fell. His heel struck the slope and cartwheeled him over. There was nothing but the breakneck pitch and tumble, and the certainty that trees and dagger branches waited below.

An earthy darkness swung up around him.

He struck, hand and head first, ending up against a scabrous bulk he took for a tree trunk. There was iron in his mouth, and he knew that if his fingers hadn't caught between the tree and his temple, the Hollow would have done Gol's job for him. As it was, his hand and head throbbed.

As he lay there, he became aware of a sharp odor spiking above the loamy dampness of the ravine and its tangled oaks. It was a slit-bowel smell: the piercing reek when the huntsman nicks something deep in the guts of a stag or boar.

Durand forced himself to move. Gol's men would be on top of him any time. With a pair of ringers stiff as a rod, he jabbed at his guts, making sure the stench wasn't his, but there was no pain.

He sat up.

It was black as the bottom of some dark pool. Carefully, he climbed to his feet. The ground still sloped. The reek caught him when he tried a deep breath. Knowing only that downhill was safer than up, he resolved to make for the river. The Hollow led straight for it, so he set off, moving as quickly as he could in the tangle-sometimes falling, sometimes picking his way.

As his eyes groped the blackness, pale shapes floated out of the dark. He began to think he should have taken another way down to the river. The shapes flickered out of sight at the pressure of his glance. There were things in the trees: round shapes. Lines glinted.

Toward the bottom, the ground leveled out, but the catching branches crowded close, making every blind step a matter of tearing clothes and gouging skin. For the dozenth time, he lost his balance. As he caught himself-imagining he was grabbing a branch, his grip closed on something else. It was flesh.

In that first instant, he thought of Gol's men and tripped himself jerking back. The pale shape of a man stood before him, and he had nothing but a dagger.

But the shape didn't move.

Durand got back to his feet. His eyes told him it was a sanctuary icon, some marble Power lost in the ravine, but he remembered the feel of skin under his fingers. Durand squared off with this strange figure, and, as he looked, he realized there were others around, all still as idols.

He forced himself closer. He saw a spear's shaft and upraised arm. Sinews stood under the skin. The eyes were open, like gla.s.s beads. The stubbled face was twisted as though the man had suddenly turned. He wore a bare tunic, but there was a s.h.i.+eld in his left hand. Durand looked round to see the cover of the s.h.i.+eld. Curled around an iron boss-a cupped guard for the fist-was a stag painted in the old style, all curves and knots. He had seen a thing like it once, hanging in the Painted Hall in Acconel. Only a skald-or a grave robber-would know how old.

And there were others.He had no time.

Though he could hear nothing, Gol's men could be stealing through this wood even now. As he moved on, however, he could not help but puzzle at the uncanny scene around him. It was as though he moved through a frozen instant in the battle for Fetch Hollow. He pa.s.sed dozens of warriors. Some men wore only their breeches. There was a bra.s.s horn curled at one soldier's hip, the metal hammered to resemble a lion's roar. Men's mouths gaped. Wide eyes shone like pearls.

Then, as Durand looked into one set of those eyes, the whole of Creation suddenly throbbed-a bell tolling-and the eye twitched round, spinning like a leech in a gla.s.s. The bell's memory shook the trees and moaned in his lungs. And, for that instant, he was face-to-face with a screaming man.

For all his years of sparring and brawling and meeting omens in the dark, Durand was off like a startled rabbit. He slithered over corpses, leapt, and bounded on. He tried to remember the river. No matter how mad the place got, it ended at the river. And the Lost did not cross running water.

These were the men of Ailnor's tale: Sons of Atthi, despite their antique gear. Here were his kinsmen-Atthians meant to be driving an army into the Hollow. He saw emblems he knew, twisted by years. But it was backward.

And it was an Otherworld thing. Even as he blundered through the maze of paralytic corpses, he fought to touch nothing, ducking around and stepping over arms and legs. The Otherworld had endless strange and fatal rules-names must not be uttered, food must not be eaten. A slip, and a man's soul might be trapped beyond reach of Heaven.

The bell tolled again. And, in that instant, he saw blades flicker like the workings of some h.e.l.lish clock.

Fires winked through the screen of oaks and frozen war. Durand stretched his stride, bounding through the tightest, most savage knots of the fighting. The world reeked. Men hung spitted on silent lances. Helms burst under the bite of blades.

He careered onward, understanding against his will that here Atthian men fought Atthian men: hundreds of kinsmen knotted together, motionless and trapped in their raging. There were no tribesmen in the Hollow. Upon the s.h.i.+elds were slathered Atthian charges. Some were men of Gireth. A herald would know them all. It was civil war.

This was the kind of madness that Ca.s.sonel's masters proposed.

The bell tolled again, and, with its t.i.tanic throb, shadows twitched across a hundred s.h.i.+elds. In the back ranks, many of the warriors looked high beyond the field. Durand could see a fire glittering in their ma.s.sed stare. Behind him, the dark hilltop was gone. A village was blazing. Spires and broad windows dripped lead. He remembered the monastery. Men pouring down the hillside into the Hollow.

The bell tolled again. Then, high in a monastery tower, the great bell tumbled. They had fired a holy place. He knew how it must have been. One lot of these fools had seized the monastery-a makes.h.i.+ft fortress-and their foes had set it alight. And this was their curse. Both sides were here now, forever tearing in the dark.

Durand ran like a leaf before a storm.

EVEN SCARED WITLESS and running for his life, Durand found there were limits. For a time he blundered through camp stools and bonfires, but soon there was nothing but unending forest, league after league. Finally, he wove to a halt, the jouncing weight of armor overcoming him. He was not sure how far he had traveled when he stopped, and so he turned back to the hill. and running for his life, Durand found there were limits. For a time he blundered through camp stools and bonfires, but soon there was nothing but unending forest, league after league. Finally, he wove to a halt, the jouncing weight of armor overcoming him. He was not sure how far he had traveled when he stopped, and so he turned back to the hill.

There was nothing: no blaze and no battle. Somehow he had run out of the horseshoe and never touched the river. He was shaking.

A wineskin had been slapping around his neck since Gol's men made their grab, and he decided that it would be safe to drink what he had brought with him. He drank deep, then dropped to his knees, the mail coat landing like a body beside him.

He fought to breathe, shutting his eyes. He had left old Duke Ailnor to the mercies of his son. He had abandoned his search for Lady Alwen. Even though he had stood outside her door when her baby was crying, he had left her now. It was hard to see how this was what he had intended.

For a time, he listened to his heart pound, then, like an echo of his own imaginings, a cry came out of the dark. He blinked hard, setting his teeth, but the cry came again: a woman's voice. And he stood. He knew it could not be Alwen, but, equally, he knew that he had seen a hill vanish. There was no choice but to follow the sound into the dark.

A man spoke. Though Durand couldn't catch the words, he could tell that the man thought he was funny. He might be drunk. The woman spoke again, her voice pitched high and loud. Splashes and sloshes rang out through the trees, and Durand knew that he must be near. He tore through a close-woven screen of willows and out into a bed of reeds. The sound and smell of running water filled his head.

Now, he peered through the curtain of reeds. Over the water of a stream, he saw a pale shape. It was a woman, her back straight, and her skirts spread on the gla.s.sy surface like a water lily.

He looked with a shaky sort of wonder.

Then someone laughed, coa.r.s.e. "Host of Heaven, if she ain't a river maiden." A fat man on the far bank bent and swung big hands. He already had a black eye. Other shapes moved among the trees. They had driven the woman into the water. She was backing away, getting closer to Durand with every step. Running water was a treacherous thing, and this was no shallow ford.

"You're a pretty thing to be out alone like this," the fat man said. "Hrethmon, would you let a thing like her out like this? You wouldn't, would you?"

Another thug stepped closer to the bank. He was young, and white-blond hair flashed in the moonlight. He was shaking his head "no." Durand heard chuckling from the gloom- too many voices.

Now, the girl spoke, her voice a clear note. "I'll warn you once more. The pair of you had better get yourselves far from here quick, or you'll regret it." The dark volume of her hair bobbed at her shoulders. She held herself straight as a lance.

But they had her in the river up to her hips, and the current was hauling.

"Right, lads," the fat man drawled. "He'll be along any time. The water maiden's man." His head rolled mockingly. "If I had a thing like you, I'd keep you under lock and key." The man was hardly over five feet tall, and his paunch made his tunic stand out like an ap.r.o.n. But there was a mace. "Why don't you come here, and me and the lads'll show you?"

The girl breathed a curse; it would be over soon.

No matter how many there were, Durand knew that he would not step aside.

The girl's hands settled in her skirts, a subtle movement. To run, she would need to tear the dress from the water. Durand saw her fingers closing. The black-eyed fat man looked as though he had also seen her grab her skirts. He waited, smiling. Three more thugs stepped onto the far bank, leering. There were dark shapes in their fists: hatchets, truncheons. Finally, the woman s.n.a.t.c.hed what she could from the water and ran.