The Book of Earth Read online

  “Oh!” Fricca bobbed her head and Erde saw her grin foolishly as she gathered the gown to her own chest and stepped aside.

  “Well,” murmured the baron, “How does our little flower grow? Are our dainty rosebuds swelling yet?”

  Fricca giggled. “Oh, just a little, my lord!”

  Erde studied the floor, her big toe tracing the cracks between the worn planks. Her father often looked her over as if she was one of his prize warhorses, but since her grandmother’s death, something new lurked in his appraising stare. She saw her narrow shape reflected in his eyes: dark hair long to her waist, long face, long slim body more proper for a boy than a young girl. The firelight flickered behind her, as if she was aflame. I look like a witch at the stake, Erde thought. She wondered what her father saw.

  “Well,” he said again, and walked around to observe her sidelong. Then he did something he had never done before. He moved close and rested a finger on her shoulder, then drew it lingeringly down her naked arm. Erde caught her breath. She must not flinch from his touch, and anger him. He had never struck her, though he had often threatened, but before, there had always been the baroness to answer to. “Skin like butter and olives,” he mused. “Like your mother’s.”

  Abruptly he dropped his hand and his glance, and turned away with a sharp gesture to Fricca. “Too thin, though, don’t you think? What are you feeding her?”

  Fricca held up the gown for Erde to step into. “She’s a fine eater, my lord, I promise you.” She dared to smile at him over one shoulder as she fastened laces. “Surely it’s our long walks out on the mountain in this devil’s weather that’s wearing her out.”

  Wearing you out, more likely, thought Erde irritably.

  The baron let the ends of his mouth curl a little. “How is it these walks don’t leave you scrawny, woman?”

  Fricca rounded her shoulders until her cleavage deepened, and giggled. Erde suddenly felt invisible and ignored. “Ha! You’d never catch Fricca out there in the forest getting her shoes dirty!”

  Her chamber-woman shot her a warning glance, but too late. The baron frowned. “Forest? You walk in the forest?”

  Fricca shrugged helplessly. “My lord! As if I could keep up with her, racing all through the trees like a boy-child!”

  “Alone in the forest? This is no boy-child! Where does she go?” He spun on Erde. “Where do you go?”

  She almost could not answer. “Nowhere special. I just . . .”

  His eyes went dark as winter oceans. “Who do you meet out there? Some boy from the villages?”

  “Boy?” The notion astonished her. “Of course not! Everyone knows about my walks!” Her careless spite had stumbled her into trouble. She could never tell her father the real reason she ventured alone into the forest, where the great trees swayed far above her head, and the amber-coated deer ate from her hand. So many of the herd were falling to the Baron’s Hunt as it ranged ever deeper into the forest in search of meat for her father’s table. Erde studied the huntsmen’s routes and led the deer away from them. Of course Fricca could not come. Fricca would betray her, and the deer. “I need the exercise. The guardsmen watch me from the gate tower!”

  Miraculously, this seemed to soothe him. He blinked and gruffly waved a dismissive hand. “Brigands and bears! It’s too dangerous! I can’t allow it.” Fricca knelt with her back to him to arrange the lustrous folds of the gown, and the baron took in the round shape of her and her trim waist. A small distracted smile touched his lips. “Well, that’s it, then. No more hiking about.”

  “But, Papa . . . !”

  “Would you have the whole court whispering that my daughter is not a lady? Walk the battlements, if you must exercise. Stroll the yards.”

  “But that’s so boring!”

  The baron set his jaw. “Your grandmother indulged you.” His velvet robe sighed about him as he made for the door. “Fricca! I’ll see you outside for a moment!”

  The look he threw from the open doorway left Erde fearful and confused. Why should a few mountain walks make him glare so fiercely? It can only be, she decided, that my father hates me.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Erde forced herself erect in the huge high-backed chair. It was carved and dark, with its own little vaulted roof to shadow her head. It had been, for the short while she lived, her mother’s ceremonial seat. Erde felt strange sitting in it, dressed in her mother’s own gown. The chair had sat empty in the great-hall for most of her life.

  But this was her first High Ritual at her father’s side. She supposed she was now, in title at least, the female head of household, though she wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Her grandmama’s final illness had swooped in so suddenly, like a hunting hawk. The old woman hadn’t had time to instruct her in practical matters.

  To her right and a step higher, Erde’s father sat rigid in his own larger chair, with its taller, more elaborate canopy. He stared off into the clerestory of the great-hall, his impatience beginning to show. Erde thought it served him right. While her grandmother held the baronial throne, she stood by the entrance herself to greet most humble or most high. A woman ruling a baronage, she told Erde, must take pains to prove she is no mere figurehead. She must meet head-on the day-to-day challenges to her authority. Meanwhile, handy by the door, the Baroness would usher her visitors right on in, and there was none of this endless preening out in the hallway or jockeying for the best moment to make an Entrance.

  But the new baron preferred to rule from a distance. His tastes ran to pomp and formality, to the ritual show of power. By your public image are you judged, he insisted, by both your enemies and your friends.

  Erde did not care about power, though her grandmother had labored long and hard to pique her interest, brazenly including her in discussions of policy from a very early age. The court thought it eccentric at the very least; at worst, unwise. “Putting ideas in the child’s head,” some muttered, as if the hiatus in patriarchy represented by their current liege was too anomalous to be considered a serious precedent. Erde listened because it annoyed the mutterers, and because her beloved grandmother wished it, but she often complained to the baroness that power seemed to be about limiting life rather than encouraging it.

  “I only hope you learn to appreciate power before you have need of it,” the baroness would reply.

  “But I have no need of power,” Erde would insist. “Papa will marry me off to some other baron’s son, and he will protect me.”

  “Do you think life is so predictable? What if Josef dies before you marry, like my father did? You are a von Alte and his only heir. Have some thought to your responsibility.”

  Erde could hear the melodious raspy voice inside her ear as if the baroness stood right beside her, instead of lying so still in the chapel. She gripped the velvet folds of her mother’s gown and willed the dead to get up and walk. Down along the wall to her right, a small door carved with linen-fold paneling led from the hall to the chapel. Staring at it, Erde could almost see it move.

  “Erde? Hsst! Daughter!” Baron Josef leaned over the high arm of his throne, reaching past carved reliefs of heroic von Alte ancestors to jog her shoulder roughly. “Remember: he will be humble before you, but you must treat him as you would the highest lord.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “He is the Church’s representative among us.”

  “Yes, Papa.” Her grandmother’s honest piety had been broad enough to include the notion that the Church was a power to be feared on Earth as well as loved in Heaven, but Erde had thought her father feared nothing. As of today, she was not so sure.

  She pushed herself upright again and tried to sit like a lady. Like her mother would have, despite chronic boredom and the dank chill of the hall. The fine silk velvet of her gown was slippery on the polished wooden seat, and Fricca had pinned the pearled headpiece too tightly in her elaborately braided hair. Erde wanted to rip it all out and run off to the comfort of the stable. Oh, Mother, she mourned, I fear I am unruly.
/>   Gazing about the hall always inspired her, so she tried that out for a while. The great-hall of Tor Alte was a grand and elegant edifice. Like the long, rhyming verses of the von Altes’ history-saga, it spoke of a grand and glorious past that Erde wished she had been a part of, for it had surely had battles and dragons in it and must have been more interesting than her life was now. The hall was high and gracefully narrow, and filled with gray light from the clerestory windows. Beneath the tall side galleries, two vast roaring fireplaces surmounted with the von Alte crest faced each other across the width, insufficient to warm so large a hall but cheering in their aspect. The walls were of light-colored stones from the south, of matching size and smoothly dressed. The stout beams and rafters were cut in the shape of branches and polychromed in green and gold. The twenty wooden columns that supported the galleries were trefoil in cross-section and as big around as Erde could reach, like great trees stretching upward to a leafy vault.

  Best of all were the column capitals: twenty carved and painted dragons, fierce and magical, each one a masterful expression of the artist’s imagination. Now here was power that Erde was interested in. As soon as she could talk, her grandmother had taught her the dragons’ names and their long lore-histories and all their aspects. Erde made up stories about them as if they were her dolls. Recalling those idyllic fantasy worlds soothed her now and drew her deeper into the memory. For instance, Glasswind, the third from the right. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but Glasswind had translucent wings that tinkled when she flew, like the glass-maker’s chimes, and she was the great Mage-Queen’s favorite. In the history-sagas, Erde’s ancestors had slain dragons, winning the right to include the figure of a dragon in the family crest. But in Erde’s games, the dragons were her staunchest allies. She had flown Glasswind in the service of the Mage-Queen many times.

  Erde recalled now that she’d dreamed of dragons the night before, for the first time in ever so long. She tried, but could summon up no detail, only a formless memory of hulking dragon-presence. Another ill omen, like the three ravens? There was talk of dragons in the countryside, fired by the rumors of witchcraft and sorcery, but nobody claimed to have actually seen one. Real dragons. Despite her childhood preoccupation, the possibility alarmed her. She suspected a real dragon would not be as reasonable as Glasswind.

  “Don’t slump, girl,” Baron Josef hissed.

  “No, Papa.”

  Erde pulled herself up once again and tried to mimic her father’s haughty, unfocused stare, straight out into space above the heads of the waiting court. But inevitably her eye was drawn downward. Anything was more interesting to look at than the vacant air, even the floor, the vast floor of the great-hall, paved with reddish slates and worn smoothly lustrous by two hundred years of the booted feet of soldiers and courtiers.

  Currently, the entire household of von Alte was arrayed across that floor, in two lines with an aisle between, all decked out in the warmest and best clothes they had, from chambermaid to visiting vassal, now beginning to wilt and shift from the fatigue of standing about in the cold, waiting for something to happen. Even the smartly plumed and black-armored honor guard had relaxed from attention. When the baron had first arrived in the hall, with his dark-haired daughter resplendent in her mother’s white dress, the priest’s horses had just clattered into the castle yard and the opposing lines of courtiers ran straight and clean from the great wooden doors of the grand entry to the foot of the dais at the far end of the hall. One long hour later, the visiting entourage milled about in the courtyard. The court herald came and went from anxious conferences with a huddle of the baron’s advisers, and still the priest did not make his entrance. Erde was losing patience with decorum. She wished her father would charge down off his throne and drag the man bodily into the hall.

  “Papa,” she whispered. “What is he doing?”

  The baron rearranged his wine-colored robes over his knees. “Playing with me, girl. What else?”

  “Oh.”

  His frank reply was a measure of his irritation. The next obvious question was why, but Erde sensed that the answer had something to do with an unequal balance of power, and might make him angry. She returned to the safety of studying the waiting crowd. Even the chicken-crone was there, staring at her still.

  Then she spotted Alla, the only face she really wanted to see, her old nursemaid and her father’s before her. Alla was watching, too, just so that she could wink and make a face when their eyes met, to test Erde’s powers of concentration, for sitting in her mother’s chair she must never giggle or grin. Alla was the castle midwife and Erde’s only remaining confidante since the death of her grandmother. With a straight back and a forthright manner, Alla was sneaking into her eighth decade with every intent of living through it. Even so, Erde was glad someone’d had the respect to find her a stool. Alla will know, she told herself, what it means to dream about dragons.

  At last, there was a stir near the grand entry. The courtiers neatened their lines abruptly. The elderly court herald dipped back into the hall with a relieved nod, straightened his green and black tabard, and gestured to the guardsmen. It took two strong men to swing each tall wooden door wide on growling iron hinges. Erde heard the herald cough and clear his rheumy throat, and worried for him. Fricca had told her he was in bad health. She’d also said that the baron thought it was time to replace him with a younger man more in keeping with the style of the new court.

  The herald faced the outer hall. “Gentlemen of the Cloth! To the court of Josef Heinz-Friedrich, fifteenth Baron von Alte, be welcome!” He turned toward the dais, graceful despite the years crooking his spine. “My lord baron! May I present the envoy from the Church of Rome, Brother Guillemo Gotti!”

  Trumpets shrilled from the galleries. Necks craned. At last, a release from boredom and the creeping chill! Through the august columned doorway marched a pair of white-clad, hooded men. Four even paces back, another pair. Another followed, then another. Ten, twenty, thirty tall sturdy men with dark beards deepening the concealing shadows beneath their cowls. The hall filled with their bulk and the wet-wool stench of their robes. Their every step was matched. Their uncanny alikeness made Erde dizzy, suffocated, as if there was no room within their sameness for so much as a breath. On the baron’s right, the young guard captain Rainer came to full alert, shrugged his black ceremonial armor into a less uncomfortable position on his shoulders and signaled his men to move in close and be ready. Erde decided not to try to catch his eye. Not now, while he was working so hard to appear mature and in command.

  When the first pair of robed men reached the foot of the dais, the entire entourage halted as one, as if at an unheard command, then knelt. Silence fell. The court’s attention turned toward the door, awaiting Brother Guillemo’s grand entrance. After a long moment, the old herald peered sidelong into the courtyard, then caught the baron’s attention with a head shake and a subtle shrug.

  The baron pursed his lips darkly. He studied the men kneeling before him. “Welcome to Tor Alte, gallant servants of the Church,” he said finally. “Bring you word of your master, Brother Guillemo?”

  “I do,” a deep voice intoned from among the paired ranks.

  “Step forward then, good brother, and be delivered of it.”

  “That I cannot, my lord. For I am he, and no man’s master.”

  The baron flushed and the court murmured, for as yet no individual rose to officially identify himself. The baron rearranged his robes some more and settled himself more comfortably. “Your pardon then, sir. But may I know your face, to better welcome you in person?”

  Court talk, thought Erde. She often wondered if her father practiced it in his rooms in secret. Nobody talked like that when they were sitting around at ease with each other.

  With a rustle of sandals on stone, the entourage rose, and one of the second pair in line moved forward to stand before the dais, arms spread wide as if in supplication. “You honor me, my lord baron, with your understanding that
we mean no discourtesy. I should explain that our vow of humility asks of us a ritual anonymity.”

  Erde suppressed an instinctive frown. She hated to admit to her father’s brand of paranoia, but surely Tor Alte’s chaplain would have informed the baron ahead of time of such an unusual Church protocol. Besides, how could this priest speak of anonymity, when the name of Brother Guillemo Gotti was already famous in a world where news traveled fitfully if at all? She peered at him more closely. Is that what a famous man looks like, so indistinguishable from his fellows? She stole a quick glance to her right, but her father gave no indication that he noticed anything amiss.

  “The House of von Alte cherishes all dedicated servants of God. Welcome again, noble Brother. If your ritual is now satisfied, may I present to you my beloved daughter Erde?”

  If the baron had hoped that chivalry would overwin humility, his gambit failed. The robed man bowed deeply but did not remove his hood. “My lady.”

  This is not Guillemo Gotti, Erde decided suddenly. How peculiar. Why doesn’t the priest speak for himself? She was sure her grandmother would have rooted out the real man right away, or coaxed him into revealing himself, but Baron Josef chose to play along, launching immediately into a detailed recitation of arrangements for the funeral and the subsequent festivities. He may not have known how many servants worked for him but he knew all the proper protocols.

  Meanwhile, Erde surveyed the other twenty-nine white robes and made her own choice. Four pairs from the back, within a few quick strides of the open door, one man seemed slightly shorter, slightly broader than the others. She had first picked him out by the quick gleam that his eyes made, catching the silvery light from the clerestory as they flicked about the hall. Mapping out the exits, or counting the guardsmen? Taking the measure of their young captain so prominently displayed by the baron’s side? The other brothers kept their eyes fixed forward. Erde pondered this mystery. Brother Guillemo might willingly ask shelter and board of Josef von Alte, but perhaps he did not trust him. Was it because he came from so far away in Rome, and therefore did not trust any stranger?