Elliott, Kate - Crown of Stars 3 (73 page)

"Strong and clear," he said into her silence. "What is it, Liath?"

She had been absently scratching the head of the Eika dog, curled up half under the bed, but his words startled her into blurting out the thoughts, all chopped up and half-formed as they were, that crowded her mind with such pleasant chaos. "When I calculate the movements of the planets in the heavens into the months and years to come, I keep stopping at midnight on the tenth day of Octumbre in the year . On that day I see great signs of change, of powers waxing, the possibility of power and of change. Three planets at nadir, and two descendant, and the waxing crescent moon is beneath the horizon in the sign of the Unicorn, although it will rise in the early hours of the morning. Only Aturna is ascendant, rising at midnight in the sign of the Healer, well, really, right at the cusp of the Healer and the Penitent."

"Is this soothsaying?" asked Sanglant. "I thought one could not read the future in the stars, and surely we have not yet reached the year . Or have we?"

"Nay, nay." She reached for her wax tablet and toyed with the stylus tied to it, then, distracted by the round of cheese sitting on the table, cut off a wedge and ate it. "This year is , and it will soon turn to . But the movements of the wandering stars are constant, so we can predict where they'll be at any date in the future. But when I calculate the chart for that day, I feel that I'm missing one thing. That if I had that one thing, all the portents would make sense."

Sanglant groaned in mock pain. "Perhaps while you think you can find all the aches in my back and arms and legs. I've never seen such a mighty fir as the one that fell—" He broke off, rubbed at a welt on his left hand, and continued. "As the one I felled yesterday. I have hacked at unyielding wood all day and been scratched by needles, and now I itch horribly, and my back hurts." But he said it with a laugh; he never whined. He moved closer so that he curled against her back, a hand stroking her. "Is it too much to ask for an hour of simple comfort?"

She and Da had lived without much laughter, but with Sanglant, it was easy to laugh. "I never get an hour of simple comfort anymore. Why should you?" He kindly did not reply except to roll onto his stomach, displaying his fine, muscled back in the light of the single lantern that hung from the crossbeam above them.

With Heribert's help he had cleaned out an outlying shed, closed up the gaps in the walls, rethatched the roof, closed off the fourth side, and hung a door in the threshold. The bed had been the first piece of furniture, four posts, a lattice of rope, and a feather bed into which they sank each night with pleasure. He had also built a chest on which to sit, and in which he kept his armor, which he oiled and polished once a week. Over the last months he had made free with Sister Meriam's herb garden and on a shelf fixed high on the wall above the chest an entire shelf of oils and salves and pouches of dried herbs lay ready.

He closed his eyes while she rubbed ointment into his back and dabbed a poultice mixed of the pulped root of carrot onto the scratches on his hands and lower arms where his tunic had not protected him from the sting of fir. The aroma of pine resin melded with oil of ginger.

It was absorbing work, the feel of his skin under her hands, the slope of his body, the half smile of contentment caught on his face. He lived so easily in the world, in the present moment, purely in the realm of senses. Sometimes that irritated her, but other times she admired it. She could never be like him. Even now, her thoughts spun off as if caught in the whirl of the heavens, ever-moving.

Was it the heavens that moved, east to west? Or was it the Earth, revolving west to east? Both Ptolomaia, writing centuries ago, and the Jinna astronomer al-Haytham, writing only ten years before, believed that physical law and observable fact proved that the Earth remained stationary at the middle of the heavens while the heavens rotated around it. But more ancient authors had argued otherwise. Indeed, the fact that no one truly knew the answer made the questions all that much more interesting to her.

Sanglant grunted as she worked through a knot in his back. God knew he didn't truly belong here in this nest of mathematici. And yet, why not? He needed a refuge, too. He needed to rest; he needed a place where he could be at peace. He had fewer nightmares now, and he didn't act quite as much like a dog as he had before. But sometimes she worried that he would grow bored with nothing to do but fell trees and help Heribert build things. She wasn't ready to leave yet. There was so much to learn that it hurt sometimes, knowing that she had finally come to a place where they would let her learn without punishing her for what she was.

And yet. . .

She stroked his cheek gently. "Why do I never feel I can trust them?" she whispered, leaning to his ear. The servants curled and hid everywhere, and she never knew what they reported to Anne, who controlled them. "Why don't I trust my own mother?"

But he had fallen asleep.

In truth, maybe he would never know the answer. Maybe he could never know it. He couldn't do everything for her. Nor could she let him.

She kissed him, slipped on her sandals, and left. She trod the accustomed path, worn smooth now, to the pits out beyond the settlement. The night lay cloudy and cool around her, but she had no trouble seeing in the dim light; she never did. With her pregnancy, she had given up wearing leggings because it was so inconvenient and wore only her old tunic, belted loosely now so it draped over her swelling abdomen and fell to her calves. None of her companions ever said anything out loud, but it was clear to her that they disapproved of the casual way in which she and Sanglant dressed—she like a commoner, he like a soldier. Yet although the magi themselves wore robes of the finest cloth, that cloth was now worn threadbare; they cared little for such trivial considerations as clothing—or so they claimed. And anyway, Da had always said that, "Fine feathers don't make a duck, swimming does."

But their censure made no difference in any case. She had no cloth for new clothing, and no way to get any unless the servants could weave a robe for her from stray beams of light or the silk of spiders or the veins of leaves. No doubt they'd do it if they could, if only to please Sanglant. She could just see a dozen or so twined around the jutting eaves of the old shed, but as she walked down the path to the stone tower, only one servant followed her. It was always the same one, a femalelike daimone with the texture of water, flowing, translucent, yet it wasn't truly interested in her but in what grew inside her, as if the fact of her pregnancy had laid a compulsion on it to remain by her side. The others still seemed to fear her.

She pushed open the tower door, found a lantern on the table, and opened its milky glass door. Licking forefinger and thumb, she touched them to the wick. Light flared, oil caught, and the lantern burned steadily. Anne had taught her this trick, had schooled her in the habits of mind that allowed her to control such insignificant amounts of fire, like to a child learning her letters so well that she need not think consciously of them to know them instantly on sight. The servant flicked away from the fire, frightened of it, but the creature did not leave the chamber, only hovered nearby like an anxious nursemaid. Liath set tablet and stylus down on the table and unlocked the book cupboard where the ephemerides lay stored among other such treasures, the repository of centuries of knowledge hoarded and saved from the ravages of time and ignorant men. So Anne always said.

Her hand touched the spine of the well-worn ephemerides, but instead, distracted, she drew out Ptolomaia's
Syntaxis.
She opened it to the second chapter where the esteemed author set down the six hypotheses. One, that the heaven is spherical in shape, and moves spherically; Two, that the Earth is spherical; Three, that the position of the Earth is at the middle of the universe; Four, that in size and distance the Earth has the ratio of a point relative to the sphere of the fixed stars; Five, that the Earth is at rest, not experiencing motion from place to place; Six, that there are two motions in the heavens, one daily motion that carries everything from east to west, and the motion of the Sun, Moon, and planets along the ecliptic from west to east.

She rose again and stepped outside. Was it pregnancy that made her restless, or the sudden infusion of knowledge, the constant studying, the pressure of her five companions in the arts whose expectations pressed on her endlessly? They wanted so much from her. She wanted so much from herself. Only Sanglant expected nothing of her, and yet that wasn't true either; his expectations were only different than theirs, less open and forceful but perhaps more insidious.

Wind off the peaks had torn up the clouds and she saw stars, quickly covered again. The sphere of the heavens revolved from east to west, and so, seen from a motionless Earth, the stars rose in the east and set in the west. But maybe the heavens were at rest and it was the Earth which revolved from west to east, as the long-dead Arethousan astronomers Hipparchia and Aristachius had suggested. That would create the same effect, wouldn't it? Or perhaps both heaven and Earth moved around the same axis, preserving their observable differences by rotating at differing speeds.

She picked up a rock and threw it into the air, put her hands over her head. It landed with a thunk beside her. Surely if the Earth were in motion, then if she threw a rock with enough force straight up into the air, the motion of the Earth would carry her away from it before it fell to the ground?

Ai, God, she had to pee again. And by the time she had done with that, her mind had swung back to the most nagging question, the only one that clung to her all the time: Why didn't she trust them?

Night was not a good time to work through such a complicated tangle of thoughts. And she was tired again; exhaustion always came on suddenly. But she had left a lantern burning and a book out, so she returned to the tower. All was peaceful there, just as she had left it, the lantern burning quietly and the book resting open on the table, a moment suspended in time that roped her thoughts back to where they had been. Certainly she couldn't throw a rock with enough force to test the theory of the Earth's rotation. Compared to the heavens, the Earth was tiny, but that didn't mean that to a human walking its surface it could be quickly traversed. She had seen ships come up over the horizon, sails and masts emerging first; that suggested not only a spherical Earth but one of immense size compared to a single human stride. It seemed to her that she need only find a place where the summer solstice sun at noon cast no shadow when measured against a stick stuck vertically in the ground as a marker. Then she could walk north along that same longitude, measuring her path, and on the next summer solstice sun she need only measure the shadow cast by another vertical marker at a different location. If there was again no shadow, then the Earth wasn't spherical; but if there was, then she ought to be able to calculate the circumference of the Earth by multiplying the degree of the angle with the distance in leagues between the two points. In
The Book of Secrets
Da had written of a town far to the south, in sun-raked Gyptos, where St. Peter the Geometer had dug a well so exactly situated that on the summer solstice the Sun's rays touched its bottom. If she walked north from that point. . .

"Your thoughts are far from here."

She jumped and gasped aloud, almost comically, and was relieved to see Sister Meriam standing just outside the threshold, walking stick in her right hand. Liath helped her over the threshold.

"I saw a light," said Meriam. "You have not woken Brother Severus?"

Liath looked toward the ladder that led to a trapdoor set into the ceiling. "I have been quiet."

"That is well," replied Meriam. She placed a gnarled hand on Liath's belly without asking permission, but she had the authority of the ancient: Liath could not really be offended by her blunt speaking or intrusive manner. "You are growing as you should be. Where is the prince?" "He's sleeping." "So many knots." "What do you mean?"

Meriam removed her hand. Age had sucked her dry; she was so small that Liath felt like a giant beside her. "I mean what I say: so many knots in the threads that bind the life of humans one to the next."

"Where do you come from?" asked Liath suddenly. "How did you get here?"

"I come from the east," said Meriam wryly, indicating her dark skin.

"I know that!" Liath laughed, then caught herself and glanced up, guiltily, knowing that Severus would not take kindly to being woken. He didn't like looking at her; her pregnancy disgusted him. But his disgust only made her wonder why a man with so much knowledge would even be bothered by such a common thing. What did it matter to him? "I mean," said Liath, "where in the east? How did you get here?"

"I came as a sacrifice."

"A sacrifice!"

"An offering." She had an accent blurred by time and age, a hint of exotic spices and brutal sun. "I was sent as a gift by the
khshayathiya
to the king of the Wendish people, but the king had no use for me, so he gave me to one of his dukes. When I flowered I was brought to his bed. Some time after that, I gave birth to a son."