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“Were those truly Dragons? All dead and rotting?”
“Nay. They were Eika. They only looked like Dragons until they got close. Then we saw through the enchantment.”
“Did we win?”
He snorted, waving a hand to indicate the destruction. “If this can be called winning. Ai, Lord, I don’t know that we beat them. Rather, they got what they wanted and left.”
“But what did they want?” she demanded. “My brother—” She faltered when she saw the flames that raged round the row of small huts abutting the tannery fence. She began to snivel and Helen, catching her fear, started to cry.
“They drove off the livestock.” The soldier grimaced as he raised his left arm, and she saw a gash running up the boiled leather coat he wore, a slash running from waist to armpit. Underneath, a thin stream of blood seeped through his quilted shirt, but he seemed otherwise unharmed except for a cut on his lip and a purpling bruise along his jaw. “I saw them myself. I’d guess they were raiding for cattle and slaves more than to kill my good Lord Henry, namesake of the king, bless them both.” He drew the Circle of Unity at his breast and sighed deeply. “Come, child, go on in.”
“But my brother worked at the tannery—”
He clucked softly and shook his head, then surveyed the scene. The old camp looked as if it had been flattened by a whirlwind. A single chicken scratched diligently beside a hovel. Two dogs cowered under the shelter of a single straggly bush. “Thank God the refugees had already left. Come, then, we’ll go down and see, but mind you, child, you’ll go up again when I tell you.”
By the time they got down to the stream the tannery fire was under control, though still burning. She saw a body, charred and blackened, over by the puering pit, but it was too large to be Matthias. This body alone remained; of the other inhabitants of the tannery, none could be found.
“There’s nothing here, child,” said the soldier. “Go on back where it’s safe. I’ll ask about. You say his name is Matthias?”
She nodded, unable to speak. Helen sucked her thumb vigorously.
With this weight on her, the walk back up the rise to the wrecked palisade seemed forbidding and it exhausted her. Helvidius found her sobbing just inside the gate, and he took her into the hall just as a cold drizzle began to fall.
He brought her heavily watered cider and made her drink, then fussed over Helen, complaining all the while. “The livestock stolen! Food stores trampled or spoiled or burned! What will we do? How will we get through the winter without even enough shelter for those left? What will we do? Without fodder, the young lord will ride back to his home, and then who will protect us? We should have gone with the others.”
But by the hearth Mistress Gisela had called a council. A stout woman, she gripped an ax in one hand as if she had forgotten she held it. Blood stained her left shoulder, though it did not appear to be her own. Beyond, in the farthest corner of the hall, the pregnant woman who had been shooting from the keep leaned against the wall, panting, then got down on her hands and knees as several elderly women clustered around her. A boy carried in a pot of steaming water, and Gisela’s niece hurried forward with a length of miraculously clean cloth.
“Lord Wichman! I beg you,” Gisela was saying, “if there is not enough fodder for those of your horses which remain …”
But the young lord had a wild light in his eyes. With his helmet off and tucked under one arm, he warmed his free hand over the fire while a man-at-arms wiped the blood from his sword. He had a fine down of beard along his chin, as fair as his pale hair. “Did you see the dragon?” he demanded. “Was it a real thing, or another enchantment?”
Master Helvidius hobbled forward, Helen dragging on his robes. “My lord, if I may speak—”
But the young lord went on, heedless. “Nay, Mistress, I won’t let the Eika drive me away! Are there no old wise-folk here, who can braid a few spells of protection into being? Give us those, Mistress, and we’ll raid as the Eika do, like a pack of dogs harrying their heels!”
“But we’ve lost full half our livestock, or more! And I hear now from those who escaped into the trees that a good half of my laborers were herded away to be slaves!”
“Or eaten by the dogs!” said a sergeant.
Mistress Gisela set down the ax and looked about for support. “Is Mayor Werner not here? He will advise as I do. How can I support my own people and yours as well, Lord Wichman?”
“The mayor is dead, Mistress,” said Wichman. “Or had you not heard that news yet? How can you not support me? I am all that stands between you and another Eika raid. And let that be an end to it!” He handed his helmet to the sergeant, stomped his boots hard to shake dirt off them, and sat on a bench, beckoning to Gisela’s niece to serve him drink.
Anna began to shake. All of a sudden the cold struck her, and she could not stop trembling. Helvidius limped over and threw a bloodied cape, trimmed with fabulous gold braid embroidery, over her shoulders. “Here,” he said. “Him as owned this before won’t be wanting it now.”
She began to cry. Matthias was gone.
In the far corner, the pregnant woman’s grunting breaths, coming in bursts, transmuted into a sudden hiss of relief. The thin wail of a newborn baby pierced the noise and chaos of the hall.
“It’s a boy!” someone shouted, and at once Lord Wichman was applied to for his permission that the woman might name her son Henry in honor of his dead cousin.
Ai, Lady. Matthias was gone.
He did not appear that day or the next among the dead pulled from fallen buildings nor among the living who crept out one by one from their hiding places. Amid such disaster, one boy’s loss made little difference.
VII
BELOW THE MOON
