The Book of Earth Read online

  She studied her candidate further, taking care not to be noticed. He was older, too, than the others, with pockmarked skin only partly hidden by his thick black beard and anonymous cowl. She could make out a narrow ferrety nose and full red lips. The priests Erde had known from the churches in the villages were mostly pale, dry creatures with bovine dispositions. The castle chaplain was reserved and precise. But this man’s face was worldly and manipulative. He reminded her of some of her father’s vassal lords, the sort who’d drink with him late into the night and the next day, scheme against him behind his back. She knew they did so. Her chamber-woman had told her all about it. Sometimes Fricca’s gossipy nature had its uses.

  “And so, my lord baron,” the false-Guillemo was saying, “with your noble permission, we poor mendicants will retire to rest after our long journey and pray, in order to properly prepare for this solemn occasion and to be received into such high-born company.”

  The baron nodded. “My permission, good Brother, and gladly.”

  The priest bowed and melted back into the ranks of his fellows. When the entourage had proceeded grandly and irritatingly slowly into the courtyard, Baron Josef rose, signaling his guard captain to follow, and strode from the hall. The court relaxed into a hubbub of debate and discussion. Suddenly invisible, Erde slipped from her ceremonial chair and darted through the crowd.

  “Alla! Alla!” She caught up with the nurse-midwife as the old woman struggled up the circular stair toward her chamber off the gallery. “Alla! Such a thing I have to tell you!”

  “Hello, moonface. Don’t be tearing that fine dress, now.” Beneath her midwife’s white head cloth, Alla’s hair was thinning, but her eyes were bright and her round fine-seamed face demanded the same frank honesty that it offered. “Really knows how to lard it on, that one, doesn’t he?”

  “Listen to me, Alla, listen!” Erde squeezed past on the narrow stair and faced her, mounting the steps backward with the velvet gown hiked up past her shins. “You know what? It’s not really him! I mean, that’s not him, the one who spoke!”

  “Slow down, lightning, so a poor ancient can understand.”

  Erde gained the top step and took a breath. Seeing Alla always reduced her self-image to that of an eight-year-old, until she caught herself and remembered she was nearly fourteen. “The monk who spoke to Papa is not really Brother Guillemo!”

  “And no monk, either, I suppose,” the old woman muttered. She scaled the final stairs with a soft groan for each rise, frail but erect, then limped determinedly along the gallery.

  Erde dogged her heels. “But I’m sure, Alla, I’m really sure! Why would he do that? Maybe he’s not even there! Oh, maybe something has happened to him, and they don’t want anyone to know!”

  “Hush, bluejay, before your tongue and your wild imagination race you neck and neck to nowhere!” Alla gripped Erde’s arm and drew her off the tapestry-hung open gallery into the side hall that led to her room. “Now listen: do you want the whole mountain to hear how its liege lord allowed himself to be drawn into Fra Guill’s silly game?”

  “But couldn’t they see?”

  “Perhaps they were not looking. This man bears the imprimatur of Rome itself.”

  “But, Papa . . .”

  “Perhaps he was looking too hard.”

  This last remark Erde did not understand, but Alla’s brisk manner made one thing very clear: that this priest came disguised might prove he feared or mistrusted her father, but it also meant that the baron had cause to fear or mistrust the priest.

  “And surely he does fear him,” said Alla later, when they were safely behind closed doors. “This is no parish priest come begging for Christmas alms. We’ve not seen his like for a while hereabout.” She set herself to brewing rose-mint tea at the tiny hearth that was barely enough to heat her draft-ridden room. Erde thought her father should provide his old wet nurse with better rooms, but Alla claimed she never felt the cold because she came from a much colder place far to the east, called the Russias. “Though he’d never show his fear, not my Iron Joe. He’ll be pacing his study now, snapping the ears off our poor Rainer lad for not divining Fra Guill’s trick ahead of time. You know how your father hates surprises.”

  “Why do you call him Fra Guill?” Erde hoped her father wouldn’t yell at Rainer too much. She thought it odd to raise a fine young man like Rainer to a position of responsibility, then bully him all the time. The baroness would not have allowed it.

  “That’s Fra for fratello,” Alla explained. “It’s Italian for ‘brother.’ But don’t you be picking that one up, pipsqueak. It’s what they call him in the villages, those that don’t favor his doomsday preaching. Mark my words, this one’s too dangerous for the likes of us to show him anything but the most obvious respect.”

  “Is that why Papa was polite, even when the priest was rude?”

  “All part of the game, chipmunk. Josef’s been looking to turn this visitation to his advantage since he first heard of it. Now he’ll be plotting to return the challenge, or figuring out some way to make Fra Guill beholden to him. I only hope he truly comprehends what kind of swamp he’s playing in.”

  Erde sipped at her tea pensively, inhaling scents of spring leaves and wood smoke. She loved Alla’s room, with its spare furnishings and the wooden drying racks tied with flowers and herbs. She felt safe there, and welcome. She hitched her stool closer to the little fire. “Alla, is it true Fra . . . er, Brother Guillemo prophesies the coming of dragons?”

  “Oh, well, yes, dragons,” Alla agreed darkly. “Among other things. It’s the other things we should be worrying about. The suspicion he encourages, the fires of doubt he fans in the hearts of the villages.”

  “I dreamed about dragons.”

  Alla nodded approvingly. “A good dream, I hope.”

  “I can’t remember. Isn’t it a bad omen to dream about dragons?”

  “Nonsense, moss-nose! A von Alte has every right to dream about dragons.”

  “Does it mean they will come?”

  “Here?” Alla cackled uproariously. “Just think of it! What self-respecting dragon would hang around here, with no livestock in the fields but some starved milch cow to steal for his dinner?”

  Erde grinned at her old nurse over the glazed rim of her tea bowl. “Well, couldn’t he just eat people?”

  “Of course not!” Alla set her own bowl down. “Where’d you get that idea, calfbrain? Dragons don’t eat people.”

  Erde nodded. Just what the Mage-Queen would have said. “Brother Guillemo says they do, least that’s what Fricca told me.”

  Alla’s smirk dismissed both Fricca and Brother Guillemo. “This priest talks about a lot of things he knows nothing about. But don’t you go telling anyone I said so. Now be off, starling, and ready yourself for the baronessa’s final ritual.”

  Erde’s grin fell away like a leaf in the wind. For a moment, safe in Alla’s little room, she had almost forgotten that her grandmama was dead.

  * * *

  Cold rain fell as the funeral procession wound down among the jutting rock ledges toward the alpine meadow where ten generations of von Altes slept the long sleep beneath rough-hewn granite slabs.

  The rain became sleet as the wind picked up. In the lead, the baron quickened his pace, though the broken scree was icy and treacherous underfoot and his gait was not particularly steady. The court lagged behind, but the thirty robed brothers tightened their cowls about their dark faces and urged the pallbearers onward, though their white-shrouded burden swayed precipitously atop its heavy wooden bier.

  Erde left off her searching for the real Guillemo among the hoods and robes and concentrated on keeping her balance. The guard captain Rainer paced beside her, his hand ready at her elbow.

  Rainer was from Duchen, a town far to the south. He’d come to Tor Alte as a motherless boy of seven, traveling with his father who was a courtier on the king’s business. Erde’s only memory of the man was a toddler’s misty vision of a tall figure d
ressed in red, for the same illness that claimed her mother took Rainer’s father soon after he arrived. Because the orphaned boy was mannerly and intelligent, the baroness took him into her service, but soon became fond of him, and raised him more like a younger son than a servant. Erde had grown up with Rainer, fighting and playing and sharing secrets as if he were the older brother she very much lacked.

  He had grown tall like his father, slim but strong and adept with his sword, and was now working too hard at the business of being an adult to have much time for a younger sister. Though he made sure to pause when they met, to tease her a little and exchange a few words of gossip, Erde missed their giggling and chasing, and lately she sensed a new formality in him, an unacknowledged distance that puzzled and dismayed her. She suspected it was because she was just a girl and Rainer was newly made guard captain, upon her father’s succession. Just turned nineteen was a young age to have risen so high, so perhaps he had become overly full of himself.

  But not today. Glancing sidelong at his pale, solemn face, Erde was sure that the baroness’ death had grieved Rainer as much as it had her. She brushed sleet from her eyes. “If only it would go ahead and snow. Grandmama always loved a fresh fall of snow.”

  Rainer nodded wordlessly. He slipped off his heavy woolen cloak and draped it about her shoulders without asking, like the solicitous brother he’d once been. Erde’s own cloak was warm enough but she knew Rainer worried about people taking ill in the cold, never thinking to worry the same about himself. He was too thin, she decided, too taut across the cheekbones, as if the anxiety she often read in his eyes were absorbing his flesh from the inside. How is my father treating you, she wanted to ask, but now was not the time for conversation, nor this place, so grim and chill, the proper place.

  The grass was brown in the meadow, as shriveled as if summer had never happened. The granite marker waited to one side, the size and shape of a stable door, and as gray as the leaden sky. The grave was shallow, a mere depression in the mountain rock scraped bare with pick and hand. But the baroness had been tall and thin, as Erde would be also.

  “There will be room enough,” she murmured sadly.

  Beside her, Rainer shifted, cleared his throat, and said nothing. She wished they could hold hands like they used to in church, keeping each other awake on cold mornings during the sermon. She wanted to weep and lean into him, as she would do with her great horse Micha, exchanging her grief for his warmth and solidity. But she knew if she slipped her hand into his, Rainer would stiffen and ease his hand away. Besides, her father would be angry if he spied her disgracing him with childish tears and displays of emotion. Erde sighed deeply and kept her eyes dry.

  The white-robes ranged themselves before the grave like a military escort, at rigid attention in two rows of fifteen, waiting for the stragglers to arrive. To Erde it felt as if she was their prisoner, instead of them being guests of the castle. When the court had finally assembled, one white-robe stepped forward as Brother Guillemo would be expected to do. He signaled the pallbearers to set down the bier. Four of the baroness’ most favored retainers, the old herald among them, took up the damp embroidered edges of the linen to lift the slight still weight and lower it into the shallow pit. The fifteenth Baron von Alte stood at the head of the grave and gazed down at his mother’s shrouded remains, frowning.

  The white-robe who had come forward began the ritual of burial. He kept his head down and his voice low and reverent until the section of the rite where the priest addresses the congregation. Then he let both rise, and augmented his performance with gestures. His cowl slid back a bit as he warmed to a lecture on the wages of sin, warning of a nearby day of reckoning. Erde waited for him to mention dragons but he only decried the wickedness of the worldly in a more general sort of way, exhorting all present to stand beside him in the coming battle against the evils abroad in the land, to take responsibility and clean out the “sinkholes of depravity” in their own back gardens.

  Erde was disappointed. She thought his harangue a standard one and over-rehearsed. Tor Alte’s own chaplain was also dull but at least he’d known the baroness, and would have done better by being able to say something personal. What did catch her interest was noting that the haranguer was not the same man who’d passed as Brother Guillemo a few hours earlier. Covertly, she located her own candidate in the back rank, but this time she forgot herself and stared too long. His eyes, darting about, met hers and held piercingly until she could gather her wits enough to glance away.

  Her heart thudded. She felt short of breath. Throughout the rest of the long, sleet-sodden ceremony, Erde pressed as close to Rainer as he would allow, and did not look up again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At the funeral feast that evening, a third false-Guillemo took the place of honor at the baron’s right.

  Candles flared at the high table and the hearths burned bright. Precious oil smoked in every lamp on the three great wagon-wheel chandeliers. Three days had passed since word had come of Brother Guillemo’s offer to reroute his pilgrimage in order to bury the baroness in the full authority of the Church of Rome. The baron’s chamberlain had been frantically gathering food and arranging the precise protocols of seating and serving. Household and guests crowded the long horseshoe of stout wooden trestles, grateful for the ceremonial excuse to eat all they could get their hands on.

  Tray after tray of roasted meats and sauced vegetables paraded past the high table for inspection. Meanwhile, the new false-Guillemo engaged Baron Josef in a peculiarly one-way conversation. Seated to her father’s left, Erde listened while pretending not to. This man’s voice was deep like the other two Guillemos’, but more nasal. Her girl-child’s enforced experience as a listener told her he spoke German like a native. It was his foreigner’s accent that was learned. She stored this detail away to pass on to Alla later.

  Erde had no trouble searching out her real-Guillemo, but now she was painfully cautious in her surveillance. She did note that he placed himself well inside the ranks of his brothers, along the right side of the horseshoe, and that while the robed and hooded man to her father’s right spoke of the cold summer and bad harvest and made an elaborate show of taking a spartan meal of bread, cheese, and spring water, the platter in front of her chosen Guillemo bore only a nibbled crust and some apple parings. But Erde spied him helping himself covertly from his neighbors’ bowls and flagons—and only from those portions they had already tasted. Now and then, she caught him staring in her direction.

  She herself could barely eat. She considered the group gluttony of feasting to be the least appealing aspect of ceremonial occasions, and resented the probability that this noisy throng of red-faced, greasy-fingered eaters had struggled through the wet, unseasonable cold not to bid the baroness a loving farewell but to stuff themselves with a good meal.

  Tonight, particularly, she felt heavy and stupid from the unaccustomed heat in the hall. The din of forced joviality beat harshly at her ears. She drank some wine to wet her nervous throat, and wished the priest would stop looking at her. She knew that, as a baron’s daughter, she would always be stared at and would always have people seeking to use her somehow, but she particularly hated feeling drawn into this man’s game. It was like being sucked into a current too strong to swim against.

  For relief, she watched Rainer as he wandered the circuit of the tables, restless, a mug of ale in hand for camouflage. She found herself thinking how fine he looked, as if she had never really noticed before, how tall and bronze-blond he was in his black captain’s tunic. Fricca had once called Rainer “delicate,” and it was true that he was not brawny like most of the baron’s Guard, the beefy bearded men whom the chamber-women cooed over. His shoulders were not overbroad and he often had to be reminded to stand up straight. But Erde had watched him spar with his men in the stable yard. He was easily their equal in strength and agility, and his greater height gave him an added advantage. What Fricca thought overanxious and fragile, Erde saw as sensitive and elegan
t. Certainly he was the only member of the baron’s Guard who’d learned how to read. The baroness had seen to that. After all, Rainer’s father had served His Majesty the King.

  How steadfast he seemed to her now as she watched him pace along the tapestried wall, how concerned and reliable. She considered taking him into her confidence and pointing out the real-Guillemo to him, but what if he didn’t believe her? Or worse still, what if Alla was right, that both Rainer and her father had noted the deception long ago, and only she, a foolish little girl, thought it was such a big secret? She wouldn’t want to seem foolish to Rainer.

  “Your table is a marvel, my lord, in times of such hardship.” The false-Guillemo drained his cup and refilled it from a clay pitcher of springwater.

  “Hospitality is one of our Lord’s commandments, is it not?” returned the baron dryly, gesturing for his own cup to be filled with hearth-warmed wine.

  Erde fanned herself covertly. Was her father calling the hooded band’s bluff with this merciless indoor heat? She found his forbearance with his lecturing guest to be quite remarkable, even as the man detailed far beyond courtesy the plight of the lands he had traveled most recently, how the fertile river plains were plagued with drought and the uplands so unseasonably cold and wet that the frost-killed crops rotted in the fields before ripening.

  “Peasant and lord, they’re declaring it a punishment from God, my lord baron, and being God-fearing folk, they wonder what it is they’ve done to deserve such misfortune. One or two bad seasons they’re used to, as good men of the land, but my lord, this year makes it six in a row!”

  The baron set down his knife, with which he had just speared a prime chunk of venison and paired it with a small potato. His eyes sparkled with drink, but his voice was neutral. “I have petitioned to the king for relief for the villages.”