The Book of Earth (23 page)

“You’re looking rather sad and thoughtful just now, milady.” Hal lowered his own heavily laden skewer into the flames. “I’d rather you ate that up and got some rest, but if there’s a tale you wish to tell, I’ll stay awake for it.”

If only I
could
tell it
, Erde mused. But even if she’d had her voice, the tale she had to tell was of events connected only by chronology, not by any logic or meaning that she could perceive. Not like Alla, or the court bard, whose stories always made sense. Events were not random in their tales as they seemed to have become in hers.

She was beginning to understand that the weight dragging down her feet and her eyelids by the end of each night’s travel was not just exhaustion. There was also the pain she hadn’t faced yet, the true depths of the grief she’d shoved aside in her struggle to survive. Hal’s arrival had eased the struggle. He was a resourceful male adult, and she trusted him. Under his protection, she could be a child again, the child she still was inside. She could feel free to grieve.

She let the skewer drift close to the fire as she brooded, until a log shifted. Sparks flew up around her wrist and the raw meat sizzled. Erde jerked her hand back, aware that her other hand gripped the hilt of Rainer’s sword so hard that it had gone numb. She lifted it out of the cloak folds and dragged it into her lap.

“How ’bout you start by telling me about that?” Hal pulled his meat out of the fire and blew on it delicately.

Erde regarded him with big eyes and shook her head. She wished she could, but it was still too painful. Even in her dreams, her mind shied away from it. Besides, she knew
she could not tell the story of Rainer’s death to anyone, not even the dragon, until she understood what he had meant to her.

“Then let me tell you what a fighting man can tell from this stranger’s weapon.” He spread his wiping cloth on the pine needles and laid out his too-hot dinner, then extended his hand. Reluctantly, she placed the hilt in his palm. Freeing it from its linen wrappings, he stood, groaning and complaining of stiffness though he settled into his fighting stance with the grace of long experience. Erde gathered up the wrappings possessively, resisting the urge to snatch back the sword and cover its nakedness. Hal held it level, first balanced on one palm, then gripped and held out in front of him. His eyes narrowed in concentration. He swung it a few times, a long sideways arc, then overhand. Satisfied, he resettled himself in a dappled fall of early sunlight to study the hilt and shaft in detail.

“A well-made blade but plainly presented. A skilled armorer, a day-to-day purpose. A working blade, not a courtier’s, definitely not your father’s, I see that now. Iron Joe would never stoop to such an honest blade.” He turned it in the light like a chirurgeon with an old bone. “A newish blade, not too heavy but on the long side. A tall man, lightly built, probably young. A blade not often bloodied but scrupulously maintained. A responsible young man, a little insecure yet but proud enough of his ability to spend several months’ salary on a better than average weapon, and unpretentious enough to avoid needless decoration.” Hal lowered the tip of the sword until it just touched the ground. “I hope this wasn’t the man they say you struck dead with a witch’s spell at the castle gate. I could use the man who carried this blade. I’d make a fine soldier out of him. Don’t go killing them off, milady—there are few enough around as it is.”

He glanced over at her, grinning, and found her face twisted with grief. He had described Rainer so accurately that it left her breathless. She could almost see him just beyond the fire, sword in hand, fresh from the practice yard, his favorite place, smiling in welcome. For a moment, she hated the elder knight. It should be Rainer sitting across from her now. Why couldn’t he have kept himself
alive? At last, the tears came freely. She could no longer hold them back.

Hal knelt quickly and set the sword aside. “Ah, child, you can’t mind the self-serving inventions of a power-mad cleric. I know you have killed no one.”

Erde shook her head frantically, then both her hands, then buried her face in them and wept as she had not been able to since she’d been told of Rainer’s death. Brother or lover, whatever he was, it didn’t matter, she wept for him anyway, and for Alla, her only other friend, and for her grandmother, whose counsel and company and strength she did not feel whole without. And she even wept for Georg, whose life she’d been forced to take, so that her own might continue.

Hal reached across the fire and patted her shoulder once, then let her cry.

She wept long after the knight had banked the fire and gone to sleep. She was unable to stop herself. She crawled over to the dragon’s side, curling up next to him for warmth, but could not keep the sobs from coming. Wave after wave until her brain was dulled with it. Only when the afternoon gloom deepened under the thick pines and the dragon stirred and woke, filling her mind with his curiosity, needing her attention, demanding her response, did she get hold of herself and dry her eyes. Her grief remained as sharp as ever but having finally given in to it, she could put it in its place. She had to. She could not be dragging about like a stone, weighed down by painful memory. She had to be fit and alert. She was the Dragon Guide, and she knew where her duty lay.

E
rde had thought it was just the usual man-talk, but Hal really did mean her to learn to use the weapon she had carried into exile. He rushed her through their meager breakfast and, while there was still light enough to see clearly, he found an opening among the tree trunks and began shoving the pine mat aside with the edge of his boot.

He waved Erde into action. “Help me with this! Good footing is crucial!” When he was sure she’d keep at it, he trotted away into the woods and came back with two stout sticks that he’d cut, each the length of one of their swords. She was almost disappointed. Now that the mule was packing Rainer’s sword, she missed it, as if the time she spent with it was what kept the memory of him alive in her mind. But the stick that Hal handed her was plenty heavy enough.

The dragon watched Erde swing the stick about for a while, then wandered off to hunt. Hal inspected the circle of cleared ground.

“Good enough. Let’s get to work.”

As he raised his own stick and took up his stance, Erde felt a sudden panic. What if he attacked? What if he humiliated her? But the knight drew her over beside him, a few paces apart, both facing a shared audience of one very jaded mule and a puzzled she-goat.

“Now. Watch my movements and repeat them exactly. No, I said
exactly!
”

The movements seemed neither difficult nor complicated. Erde’s confidence soared with her relief. But Hal made her repeat each one until she had managed ten perfect repetitions in a row with no rest in between, and after the fourth simple ready, step, and swing exercise, she was heated up
and breathing hard. Her right arm ached in places she hadn’t even known she had a muscle.

As soon as he saw her growing clumsy, Hal stopped the lesson.

“Enough for today.” He took her stick and tied both of them to the mule’s saddle. “Now. Here’s how you stretch that arm out so it won’t tighten up on you.”

And so it went, for many nights’ travel through the unbroken forest. They were spared rain for a while, and the temperature warmed slightly as they descended from rock ledges and tall pines through dense stands of birch and golden-leaved aspen, down into maple and wide-spreading oak touched with a blush of early fall color. For a while, the shared nightmares ceased, perhaps because both Erde and the dragon felt safer in Hal’s company, perhaps because they were eating more regularly, or simply because he pushed them hard and they were too tired. They would stop at dawn, exercise, eat, and sleep, then wake at dusk, exercise and move on, night after night.

They kept to the cover of forest, staying clear of the towns, skirting the occasional farmstead cut out of the wilderness, avoiding a woodcutter’s cottage or two. Finally, when Hal was confident that he could detect no pursuit, he left Erde to sleep one day while the dragon hunted, and rode the mule into a charcoal burners’ camp to trade news for bread and cheese.

He found his news was already stale, but being able to offer an eye-witness account of the Tubin burning gave him his choice of supper tables and a full pack to speed him on his journey.

“Came in from the north, like I was headed from Tubin the long way,” he explained to Erde later. “Left to the south and cut back east soon as I could. You know what the latest story is?”

She shook her head, her mouth gloriously full of fresh bread and cheese.

“That the Baron’s Hunt cornered you where two rivers crossed, and were just about to bind you when you called up a demon in a blinding flash of light to carry you away to safety.” He cocked his head at her. “There’s just no end to your powers, milady.”

Erde smiled back at him, trying to take the witch tales
as casually as he did. But they weighed on her increasingly, because she was sure that someday she was going to be made accountable for them.

During the first nights of travel, Hal talked to her as they walked, about the countryside, the route he was taking, where they might camp for the day. But after the first few, he ceased trying to keep up both ends of this one-way conversation. Soon they were traveling in silence, but it was a companionable silence.

“I’ve traveled alone for two years now.” They were setting up camp by a streambed. “There’s many out in the countryside that don’t know or understand the details of the king’s troubles with his barons. Some’ll still show a King’s Knight some respect, and there are things I can do to help out here and there, so I get along.” Hal brushed bread crumbs from his jerkin. “I still wear the Red as you can see, out of respect for His Majesty—only took it off once or twice sneaking into Erfurt to check up on the situation at court. I’m best off staying unobtrusive, so some baron doesn’t get a notion to try me for invented treasons. So I’m used to silence. I talk to the Mule sometimes, but I never let myself talk to myself. That way madness lies. . . .”

Erde was not sure of that. She’d talked to herself quite a bit when she’d had her voice. She’d never thought she was going mad until she could no longer speak her mind out loud. Besides, Alla had talked to herself nonstop, sometimes even when you were there in the room with her, and Alla was the sanest person Erde had ever known. Except for her grandmother, although, to Erde’s mind, the baroness’ dedication to duty and power did occasionally put her sanity at risk. Suddenly the purpose of this line of reasoning became clear: if she dedicated herself to the dragon as it seemed she had been born to do, what would she become? Would she give up love for the sake of duty, as her grandmother had apparently done? Would she give up her lands for the sake of an obsession, as Hal had done? She brooded over this until she remembered she had neither lands nor lover anymore, so what did it matter?

Even so, she woke the knight out of an after-dinner doze by the fire to discuss the issue.

DID MY GRANDMOTHER LOVE POWER TOO MUCH? She formed the letters very carefully in the soft
ash layer, as if to render her question more comprehensible.

Hal blinked, yawning. “Hmmm. Well. Yes. Now that’s a hell of a question to come out of a young girl.”

Erde frowned at him sharply.

“Yes, yes, just let me think. That was a sound sleep you woke me out of. Let’s see . . . it depends on who you ask, you know?” He sat up, rubbing at his beard as if it might help him to think more clearly. “If you ask me, which you did, I’d say yes, of course, since she loved power more than she loved me. But ask the crofter whose survival depended on her honesty and diligence in running the estates, and he’d like as not say no. At least your grandmother, unlike your father, was capable of wielding power’s responsibilities and thinking of someone other than herself. Does that answer your question?”

Erde nodded pensively. She’d thought of power as a license to take what you needed and push other people around. That was what her father did. But not her grandmother? Power as a responsibility was a new concept, yet it made sense in the pragmatic context Hal had offered. She understood she’d been frivolous all those times she’d vexed her grandmother with airy insistences that she didn’t care about power. She was troubled by his suggestion that the baroness had considered her to be Tor Alte’s proper heir. Had she failed her grandmother without knowing it? Would events have fallen out differently if she’d been a more diligent student in the baroness’ unofficial course of study?

At least her grandmother had never spoken of power with personal relish, the way her father did. Yet in following the priest’s lead, the baron had given up power to him. Why give it up so readily, if he loved it so much?

Hal was dozing again. She nudged him with her foot.

WHY DID PAPA GIVE OVER TO FRA GUILL?

“What has gotten into you, girl? Was it the fish for supper?” Hal struggled up again, groaning as if the effort were enormous. “I know you won’t rest till I answer.”