Like Bertran, that last quality, Beatritz thought. Like Urté. And then a newer thought, as she reached up again to gentle her restive owclass="underline" Like me.
"Oh, Aelis," she murmured aloud. "Oh, sister, did we all begin to die the night you died, with or without the child?"
It was possible, she thought. There were ripples to events, and they went a long way sometimes across the dark pools of time and the world.
Brissel shifted on her shoulder again and then suddenly flexed his sharp talons in a way she knew. It was always like this: without any warning at all the presence of the goddess might come to her. Catching her breath, feeling the familiar speeding up of her pulse, Beatritz waited, and was answered, assuaged, with images in her darkness, images swirling to take shape as out of some primal fog before the world was made.
She saw two castles and recognized them immediately. Miraval and Talair—she had known those proud, twinned assertions all her life. Another image quickly: an arch, immeasurably old, massive, humbling, carvings of war and conquest stamped upon it like foreshadowing from long ago. And then, as she released her breath in a spasm of love and pain she could not quite hold in, the High Priestess of Rian saw a lake in her mind, a small, delicate isle in the midst of it, three plumes of smoke rising straight as swords into the windless winter sky. The last thing she saw was a tree. Then the images were gone and she was left with only darkness again, and Brissel on her shoulder.
It came like this, and it went, never coerced, never subject to entreaty. The goddess remembered her children sometimes and sometimes she forgot them in the caprice of her nature. She could shower gifts like blessed rain in spring, or she could turn her back and let ice and fire have their way. She had a face of laughter and one of desire, a countenance of true compassion and a terrible visage of judgment. In the teachings of Arbonne it was Corannos the god who was kinder, more soberly caring for men and women. Rian suffered them, and loved them, but she could be cruel as nature was cruel. It was the god who held their mortal children always in mind, who did not fail to see their sufferings upon the earth. So it had been taught in Arbonne for generations.
The teachings were different elsewhere. They were very different in Gorhaut.
She was going to have to stay here, Beatritz understood. Only on the island could she have access to any such precognitions as this one. A message would have to go to Barbentain tonight. She would ask the two young troubadours who were wintering with them here. They would not deny her; these were not men to hide in the sea when death and ruin were coming down from the north. She would send them to the countess, warning her, telling them all where the culmination was to be.
It would be in the place of this vision, she was being told: by that small isle in Lake Dierne, by the arch, the two castles, it would end there.
Of course, she thought, aware of an inner stillness in the aftermath of the presence of Rian. Of course it will be there. She felt the nudge of an old sorrow. I should have known. That is where it began.
She was wise and no longer young, Beatritz de Barbentain, deeply conversant with the ways of power in the world, and long since accustomed to her darkness and the occasional gateways to knowledge it gave her. She was, in fact, more privy to the paths of Rian than she allowed herself to acknowledge, for she had always wanted more than she had. It was the nature of her family, the legacy of her blood. Still, the goddess had never yet abandoned her entirely, however long the intervals might be. She knew a great deal, having been granted, at moments such as this, clear, sharp visions through rifts in time hidden from all the other living children of Corannos and Rian.
On the other hand, there were things even the High Priestess on her island did not know and had never known, whether of future or present or the widening ripples of the shaping past. Nor would it have been proper if she had. Oaths sworn to the dying were sacrosanct in Arbonne.
When they come down at last from the snows of the pass into Arbonne, the crusading army of Gorhaut are halted by their spiritual leader, and on a high plateau they kneel in their armour, every man of them, to hear the High Elder's prayer of thanksgiving to the god.
They have come through the mountains with humbling, awe-inspiring ease, only some few hundred men and horses lost to the high cold and the icy, treacherous path and the one—amazingly, only the one—avalanche that missed the main army by less than a bowshot, taking only the rear guard down into a white death with no true burial.
It might have been—it ought to have been—so much worse, this folly of taking an army through the mountains in winter to seize the advantage of surprise. Even the High Elder himself narrowly escaped losing his life. Standing beside their tall king, he speaks to the army with an arrow held aloft in one hand and a crimson bandage on his left arm, brilliant against his blue robe and the white of the snow behind him. He had caught up to them, wounded as he was, in the midst of the pass, riding alone—which every man there knows to have been foolhardy beyond words. Foolhardy, that is, for one not perfectly trusting of Corannos, not favoured—as Galbert de Garsenc, High Elder of Gorhaut so manifestly is—by the blessing and the protection of the god. Which means that they, too, in his company, are so blessed, the chosen, the elect, the weapons of Corannos.
This, in fact, is his message to them when the prayer is over and they rise. He holds up for all to see the Arbonnais arrow—fired by a coward, and not in a time of war—that might have killed him in his own castle. The god is with us, he tells them all, we are his agents and his instrument.
It is hard not to agree, and the men of the army of Gorhaut, in the presence of their king, are not inclined to be cynical or doubting at a time like this. They have come miraculously through the mountains in winter, and before them now, bright and fair as a dream under blue skies lies the land that has been promised them.
Promised, that is, after the scourging is done. They are the hammers of the god, the High Elder proclaims. The temples and villages of Arbonne and the depraved, unclean women who inhabit them are the anvils upon which their most holy, cleansing blows must fall.
The temples are first, the castles will come after, he tells them. Everything will come to them if they but follow their great king. The men of Arbonne are cowards, they are woman-mastered, cuckolded as a matter of course by their own musicians and barnyard servants. What, Galbert de Garsenc asks, what will such soft men do when they come face to face with the assembled might of Gorhaut sweeping down upon them with the power of the god?
They will die, he tells them, answering his own question, as a sound shaped of hunger and excitement rises among the army. They will die like the craven unbelievers they are, and when all is done, when holy Corannos is worshipped properly again in this land, then shall the men of Gorhaut have shown themselves worthy of the great favour the god has always bestowed upon them. Then shall the whole world know their worth. Then shall this sunlight, these high green valleys, vineyards and castles and grainfields, the rich cities and harbours and the great sea beyond—all shall be truly given over to Gorhaut by the high, pure grace of Corannos.
Shall this not be the way of it, he cries to them, the magnificent instrument of his voice carrying the question down on the breeze to all those gathered below.
They give him his answer, fervent, exalted, with one voice of their own.
The king rides down from that high place, then, the High Elder beside him with the arrow still held aloft. They take their places together, handsome men, stern and majestic, at the forefront of an army. Near to them but a proper distance behind rides the lord Borsiard d'Andoria at the head of a company of his own men. The Portezzan's presence among them, the army has been told, is a mark of how not only the god but all the countries of the world are with them in this purging of dark unholiness.