The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5)

The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars #5) Page 329

He eased up onto his forearms. He lay on a hillside overlooking a valley a quarter cleared and the rest wooded. A half dozen unseen hearths spun fingers of smoke into the darkening sky. In one clearing a pond faded to a pewter gleam. It was hard to see more detail than this because the sun was setting, the far horizon bathed in an orange-red glow so beautiful that he wept.

4

FOR three days they trudged overland along an old Dariyan road still used by the locals for market traffic, of which they saw little. This was the driest country Hanna had ever seen. Nothing that was truly green grew, only prickly juniper, the ubiquitous olive trees, and so many varieties of thorny shrub or broom that she wondered what they had to protect themselves against besides goats. She and the others soon became coated with a film of dust. Her mouth was always parched. Her lips cracked, and the sun was merciless.

They changed direction, turning east at dawn on the fourth day so that they marched into the rising sun, and for the next three days followed a trickle of water running over rocks which Sergeant Bysantius persisted in calling a river. Every chance she got, she sluiced its waters over her head, neck, hands, and red, swollen, blistered feet until she was streaked with sweat and dirt never completely washed away by the water. Yet for moments at a stretch that cool touch relieved her skin and the headache that continually plagued her.

Where a hole in the ground swallowed the stream, they turned up a defile with jagged, steep-sided hills rising to either side. After two arduous days on a rocky trail, making poor time and less distance, the wagons were left on the path with a guard while Sergeant Bysantius pointed the rest at an impossibly steep trail that led straight up the side of the hill. His soldiers rolled a dozen barrels out of the wagons and with great difficulty lashed them to stout poles and lugged them up. Two other men carried Mother Obligatia on her stretcher up that twisting trail which switched back and forward and back while the rest of them strung out behind, falling farther and farther back. It took hours, or years, before their footsore and exhausted party reached a row of buildings perched on a ledge cut into the cliff face.

“I almost feel that I am home again,” gasped Sister Hilaria with as much of a smile as she could muster. Her lips were bleeding, as were Hanna’s.

Certainly the monastery resembled St. Ekatarina’s in its inaccessibility, high up along the cliff face with a forbidding rock ridge above and only the trail leading up to it. An army might besiege this small settlement to no avail since it possessed, as they discovered, a spring within the walls.

“Quite at home,” added Hilaria, who smelled water when they passed a stairwell cutting down into the rock. “I only need a pair of buckets and a shoulder harness, and I’ll be ready to set to work hauling up water.”

Instead, they settled Mother Obligatia in the pair of adjoining rooms—cells, really—where they were herded and shut in. The two chambers were built of stone so cunningly fitted together that it appeared the builders had not needed to use mortar. The floor was dirt, as gritty and dry as the air. Six pallets lined the walls. The second room had four actual beds with rope strung between the posts for a mattress. It was smaller than the first but opened onto a tiny, triangular courtyard where they could take air and sun; this courtyard boasted a high brick wall too high to see over and a single olive tree under whose inadequate shade stood a stone bench. There was not a single other living creature in the courtyard except ants and flies. They couldn’t even hear birds singing.

“Here you will rest until I return to fetch you,” said Sergeant Bysantius to Rosvita. “The monks will care for your needs. I leave as well ten of my men-at-arms as guards. Do not, I pray you, be fearful. I mean you and your companions no harm.”

“A fine sentiment,” said Rosvita when she translated his speech for those who could not understand Arethousan, “but we cannot trust him. We must scout out our surroundings and make ready to escape.”

Yet when Hanna surveyed their company, she knew they had traveled as far as they could. Ruoda and Jehan were so weak it Was a miracle they had come so far, and Jerome and Gerwita had only made it up the trail by stopping to rest every ten paces. All four of them lay on the pallets, utterly exhausted. Even Fortunatus and Heriburg were flagging, even she was, and the old ache in her hip had returned. They hadn’t the strength to run, not now.

For the first ten days they mostly slept, talking little, recovering their strength, with rock and a hard blue sky their only companions. Sister Petra insisted on sitting outside in the direct sunlight until her face was burned and blistered from the sun, and then she suffered under a terrible fever for days.