Across the Spectrum (21 page)

Other tents within the camp had given way altogether and
gone flying inland, giving him a clear view all the way to the horselines.
Those were in less disarray than he might expect: his master of horse was good
at what he did.

Amid the tossing manes and scrambling horseboys, Carl’s eye
found the one who had, one way and another, come into his heart and refused to
leave. He was a big horse, a fit mount for as big a man as the king, grey as
ash, with a high arched neck and a waterfall of silver-grey mane.

“Tencendur,” Carl said, and even in his grief he smiled.

He could swear the little curling ears pricked, though they
could hardly have caught the sound of his voice through the howl of the wind.
“Tencendur my heart,” he said.

It was no day to be out on a horse—even the best horseman
might struggle to keep his seat—but Carl hated his tent suddenly, hated the
chair he had been sitting in and the tent that was tearing itself apart around
him. He braced himself and forayed out into the gale.

It struck the breath out of him, buffeted his body and
flattened his cheeks to the skull. It was like a gate with half the defenders of
a city on the other side, barricading it against him. But he was stronger,
just.

He could not see where he was going; he had to navigate by
memory and by occasional glances to the side, to straighten his path if it
started to wander. The wind blew the smell of the horses toward him. Then he
was among them, and the gale was somewhat less in the shelter of their bodies.

The wiser among them had turned tail to the wind and dropped
their heads and resolved to endure. The younger and the more foolish started and
skittered and deafened each other with the explosive snorts of alarm, but hours
of wind had taken the edge off all but the worst.

He made his way to Tencendur’s place in the line. Someone
was there with the stallion, a wild-haired boy in a rough shirt and bare feet.
The feet were filthy, but something about them made Carl pause.

It was not that they were particularly small, but they were
narrow, and they lacked the calluses that distinguished the habitually
barefoot. These feet were accustomed to be shod, but not for a while, from the
look: they were scratched and bruised as well as thick with dirt.

The boy was doing something with Tencendur’s tether:
securing it, one would think. Except that, like the feet, something was not
right there, either.

Just as Carl hurled himself against the wind, the boy tugged
the tether free and clambered onto the stallion’s back.

And Tencendur allowed it. All too well the king knew how
little tolerant he was of strangers on his back. He would not suffer to be
ridden without a saddle at all, and even Carl, who was by no means an ill
horseman, had eaten a fair few mouthfuls of dirt in persuading the horse to
accept him.

Tencendur bore this ragged scrap of a child as if he had
been the most docile of plow horses, and obeyed him without so much as the
slant of an ear: sat down on his haunches, wheeled and sprang full into the
gale.

∞

The boy was a witch, there was no other explanation. By
the time a party had scrambled together and mounted for pursuit, he was long
gone, and the king’s best-loved charger with him.

They knew where he had gone. He had galloped straight toward
Narbonne. And that, in the king’s mind, shifted the city perceptibly away from
friendship and into hostility.

Carl had not survived so long in this world of strife by
allowing his temper to overcome his good sense. But he was angry, and when he
was angry, people walked very, very softly and hoped to keep their heads.

∞

Aymery the page heard them talking under the somewhat
diminished roar of the wind: king and commanders arguing over the taking of
Narbonne. Some said it was a waste, that they should leave this place and go
back to Italy, go back to Francia, go back to Germania—go anywhere but here.
Others were all hot for a fight, to wipe away the shame and the folly of
Roncesvalles.

It was a good thing Aymery was only a page and not a
general, or he would have had plenty to say to that. He had lost father and
brothers and cousins in those mountains. He was all alone in this part of the
world.

He had not felt anything since he walked the battlefield,
turning over the bodies and naming those he knew. His father had been in six
pieces. Six. He had counted. He still counted them every night in his dreams.

If they went back to Francia, he would have to face his
mother and tell her what he had seen. His mother was a daughter of the old
blood; she bent her knee to the new religion and said the words that were safe
to say, but he knew to whom she prayed in the sanctuary of her own house. She
could curse, too, with an aim as sure as a Saracen archer’s.

If she cursed him, he would bow his head and endure it. If
she cursed the king. . . that was something he thought about often, in these
long useless days outside of Narbonne.

Now the king’s horse was stolen. Horse of ash, whose name
meant Strife—Carl had won him in a battle, speared his rider through the heart
and hurled the body into a ford.

The horse had not taken kindly to being conquered. He had
flung the king off when he tried to mount, and forced him to make do with
another horse for the rest of that battle. But the king loved him, had loved
him from the moment he crashed to the ground and saw those deadly hooves rise
up and over him and forbear to trample him. He had forbidden his Companions to
punish the horse, and commanded them to capture him and take him back to the
camp.

He had persevered until the beast let him stay in the
saddle. “And I’m much the better horseman for it,” he had said to Aymery, who
happened to be at hand on the day he managed the whole of a ride without being
pitched off.

Love was strange. Aymery did not love the horse, and he was
not sure about the king. But he was doing nothing of any great use here, and he
had grown up in the woods of old Armorica. He knew how to hunt. What he hunted,
he always found.

It was a gift. People said he got it from his mother, along
with his small stature and his nut-brown skin and his thick black hair. In
Spain he had as often as not been taken for a Moor. In these parts he could
pass for a child of the old Romans, or of older people still—and that was true
enough in its way.

While the king and his council went on with their arguing,
Aymery put on his plainest clothes and hid his knife under his tunic and
slipped out into the wind. It was little more than a brisk breeze now, though
still strong enough to make the banners flap and strain.

The king’s tent was a tattered remnant; he had had to set up
housekeeping in a relic of one of the Spanish battles, a captured Saracen
emir’s pavilion, all silks and tassels and bejeweled carpets. Aymery’s feet had
grown unreasonably fond of those carpets. It was hard to forsake them for sere
summer grass and bare dusty earth.

But needs must. He ducked his head and made himself
invisible, which was another gift he had. As swift and silent as a shadow, he
ghosted through the camp.

∞

Everyone else said the horse had gone into the city.
Aymery had a habit of ignoring what people said. He followed the tracks in the
dust.

They led him toward the city, but angling gradually around
it. They never went near the gates at all.

The city was locked shut. The farmsteads outside of it were
deserted; the road was empty. No one in the king’s army had done anything to
encourage it, but it looked and felt like a siege.

Aymery was even more careful than before to pass like a
whisper of wind. Even invisible, he felt the twitch between his shoulder
blades, as he caught the glint of metal atop the wall. There were archers up
there, armed and ready to shoot.

He had no particular thought of stopping a war. He was
curious, more than anything: to know why a vagabond child would do such a
thing, and how he had managed to tame that of all horses. One would think that
the horse and the boy knew each other.

Aymery was a little off his head, maybe. He had been since
the battle in the pass. So many had died already; the gates of Heaven must be
crowded with souls clamoring to get in.

Well then, he had better find the horse.

He passed under the walls without taking an arrow in the
back or setting off the alarms. But his luck had failed in another way: the
horse’s trail was gone. A flock of sheep had run across it, and what looked
like a fleet of oxcarts after that.

None of them had lingered. He knelt in the road where the
tracks were most tangled and confused. The horse’s hoofprints were still there,
buried under all the rest; the memory of his passing was in the road still, and
dissipating in the air.

The wind had died to a whisper of breeze. It stirred up the
dust. When Aymery closed his eyes, he could see the horse tripping lightly past
the city, with his rider perched insouciantly on his back.

He followed that memory, that sensation like a shaft of sun
on his face. If he turned too far, it faded. He aimed toward the direction
where it was strongest, walking with eyes shut as often as not, because it was
easier that way.

∞

“Are you blind, then?”

The horse’s track was stronger now, the road as deserted as
ever. The voice came out of empty air. It was clear and imperious, and it spoke
priestly Latin with a distinct southern lilt.

Aymery opened his eyes. He was still under the wind-tossed
sky, but there was no city to be seen—and it should have been looming behind
him. He stood on a wide and empty heath, an expanse of summer-seared grass and
wild thyme that rolled down toward a tumbled sea.

There was a road ahead of him, perfectly straight. Its
paving stones were worn but still smooth.

Romans had built this. It stretched behind him, though he
did not remember the feel of it under his feet, and it stretched ahead,
vanishing into a fold of the hills.

There was no living creature anywhere in sight. Aymery
addressed the direction from which the voice had come, civilly, as one was wise
to do in the presence of magic. “What should I be seeing?”

“What is in front of your face.” The voice was full of
laughter. It had shifted from the side to the front, but there was still
nothing to see, not even a ripple in the air.

For lack of greater inspiration, Aymery walked forward. He
half expected to collide with an unseen body, but the way was clear.

He decided to find that encouraging. It could be a trap, but
he had a nose for that, and it detected only thyme and the sea.

And something else. Something faint, slightly pungent, more
pleasant than not. The smell of horse, hanging in the air ahead of him.

He followed it down the straight track into the hills.

∞

The hills opened as he had known they must. The green was
somewhat less wild here, the roll of the land divided with walls of unmortared
stone. The heart of it was such a place as one saw everywhere that Rome had
been: villa and outbuildings, stables and storehouses.

Aymery saw no cattle in the fields and no flocks of sheep in
the hills, and no ash-grey stallion grazing in safety near the villa.
Everything was still, as if the earth itself forbore to breathe.

The road led straight to the villa’s gate. No bird called,
no insect buzzed. He walked through an empty world, into a deep and eerie
silence.

And yet he was not afraid. The horse’s scent led him still.
In front of the gate was a pile of droppings, so neat it seemed to mock him,
and more fresh than not.

The gate opened before him. He paused, remembering tales of
traps and dangerous deceptions. But the horse had gone in, and Tencendur was
even warier than the run of his kind.

That did not mean Aymery was safe, at all. Still, the horse
was inside; that, his bones were sure of. He took a breath and stepped over the
threshold.

Chickens clucked and fluttered in the courtyard. Cattle
lowed in the byre beyond. Sheep bleated. Life teemed and hummed and buzzed as
it did everywhere that humans were.

He was in the world again, but where exactly it was, he
could not have said. It was solid under his feet, and the sky was open
overhead. And there was a woman coming toward him in the fading daylight.

She looked ordinary enough: a sturdy woman in a plain and
practical gown, with a long bony face, and dark hair gone mostly grey. “Good
evening,” she said civilly in Latin, with an accent that Aymery had not heard
before: low and liquid, with a strong rhythm, almost as if she sang the words
rather than spoke them. She was not the one who had addressed him on the heath,
but he thought she might be a relative.

“A fair evening to you,” he answered her with equal
civility.

“You are welcome in this house,” she said.

He bowed as if she had been a lady of the king’s court.

That seemed to amuse her: her lips twitched and her big dark
eyes glinted. She turned with a flourish that took him by surprise, swirling
her skirts, and strode before him with her thick long braid swinging to her
substantial haunches.

He was gaping like an idiot. He shut his mouth and hastened
after her.

∞

The villa had been quite grand once, with a pool in the
courtyard and mosaics on the floors. The pool had long since been filled in; a
kitchen garden flourished there now, with the chickens keeping the weeds and the
insects at bay. The floors were still lovely though faded, especially in the
dining room, where the rest of the inhabitants of the house were gathered.

Aymery had little time to appreciate the glory underfoot,
though he did manage to notice the number of horses leaping and gamboling and
peacefully grazing in fields of malachite and golden glass. There were live and
breathing beauties gathered around the table.