Authors: Marjorie B. Kellogg
“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?
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 dressed 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.