The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5)

The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5) Page 80

Sigfrid had found a spring in the rocks and drank deeply as the others woke, stretched, and came to slake their thirst. Ivar walked forward, but the ground betrayed no trace of what he had seen in the night. He saw no prints of wolf and certainly nothing like the massive paw prints that lions of such a size ought to have left behind them as evidence of their passage.

Gerulf came up to him. “I see you’ve noticed it as well. That looks to me like the monastic estate. We’d best strike out at once, so we don’t have to spend another night in the forest.”

“Alas, Lord Baldwin,” Dedi was saying back by the spring as Baldwin staggered up, still half asleep but no less handsome for looking quite rumpled, “it was quiet enough this night, although your stout friend Ermanrich quite bent my ear the whole time we were on watch with so many astounding tales that I don’t know what to think.” He paused, as a thief might pause to listen before grabbing the jewels out of their resting place in a nest of silk. “I fear your lions chose not to pay us a call, eh?”

There was a scuffle, broken up by Hathumod with a sharp whack to each of their behinds with a stick.

Gerulf grabbed Dedi and hauled him aside. “You’ll be polite, Nephew! This man’s a lord.”

Dedi muttered a comment under his breath.

“I did too see lions!” retorted Baldwin. “No one ever believes me.” Ivar examined the ground again but the only prints he saw were his own boots. “It’s said that the Enemy brings strange visions at night,” he said.

“So may God, my lord,” replied Gerulf, “but it’s hard for mortal man to tell the difference between the one and the other. Saw you anything on your watch?”

Ivar didn’t have the courage to speak of what he’d seen, nor did Sigfrid mention it.

IX

A GRAVE CRIME

1

IN the city of Darre, one saw the years laid bare on every street. Near the river, laundresses hung out clothing to dry on fallen columns from a temple once dedicated to the goddess of love. Competing hospices for pilgrims filled three-storied apartment houses near the monumental baths built in the time of the Emperor Tianathano. Cattle and goats grazed in the vast arena where horses had raced. The vast brick marketplace erected during the reign of the Empress Thaissania, she of the Mask, had been abandoned in favor of an ever-changing collection of makeshift stalls set up within the shelter of colonnaded temples that fronted the main avenues, which had themselves been built to honor gods whose names Hanna did not recognize, although Liath might have.

The four-tiered aqueducts built by ancient Dariyan engineers still brought water into the city from the hills; under their arches beggars sheltered from the sun. Itinerant cobblers repaired shoes on the marble steps of palaces, now empty, and whores sported where emperors had enjoyed other kinds of feasts. But with half the buildings in the city deserted, no one lived in hovels; every woman there might bide with a spacious and only slightly damaged roof above her head, even if she starved. The Dariyans had built their city so that it would last until the end of time. Maybe it would.

It seemed impossible that so many people could live all together in one place. Hanna could not fathom what the city must have looked like in the days, hundreds of years past, when every building had its purpose and the half-breed citizens of the old empire, proud and resolute, crowded the streets.

“I beg pardon.” She paused beside a merchant’s stall in the shadow of a colonnade near the baths; this enterprising fellow sold copper medallions which displayed the images of saints. “I have lost my way. Which road leads to the west gate?”

She had learned enough Aostan in the months she had been here to serve her in situations such as this; understanding the natives when they replied was trickier. This man was used to dealing with foreigners. He looked her over, gaze lingering on her pale braids, then studied her companion, Rufus, whose hair was as startlingly red as hers was pale blonde. He spat on the ground and with a gap-toothed grimace pointed to the right where the avenue forked.

“Not much for words, was he?” commented Rufus as they trudged on, keeping to the late afternoon shade.

“I don’t think he liked us.” The glaring heat made an oven of the city. She was sweating so much that she had given up wiping it away. Her tunic stuck to her back, and a line of sticky sweat had formed where her hat pressed against her forehead.

“None of them do. They think we’re barbarians. They think we’re stealing their grain and their chickens.”

They paused to gawk at the huge bulk of the amphitheater, known colloquially as the Ring, looming to the left as they followed the avenue east. The river lay behind them, and when Hanna turned, the broad brim of her hat shading her eyes, she could look up at the hill on which lay the two palaces, side by side, skopos and regnant, elaborate new constructions grown up on top of whatever ancient temple had once graced that hill. “The upper city,” the folk who lived there called it, in distinction from the rest of Darre.