“Who feeds them?” asked one of the soldiers. “Ground’s not been broken up or even ploughed.”
“The guards are feared to come in,” Hathumod sobbed, “on account of the sickness.”
They had built a pair of huts within the hollow of the amphitheater, protected somewhat by the high ridgeline. Four scrawny goats grazed in brambles at the limit of their tethers. Six sheep mowed the amphitheater slope; none had lambed or were even pregnant. Ivar did not see the community’s ram.
The monastics had heard the sound of horses and were waiting, clustered around the seated biscop. Like the others, Constance had grown thin, and thinness made her look old, frail, and weary. No more than a dozen huddled fearfully with the forest at their back. Ivar recognized Sigfrid’s impossibly petite form at once, but Ermanrich seemed to be missing. Nay, that was him standing next to Sigfrid, only he was shrunken in girth, a stick, looking none the healthier for having lost his energetic stoutness. His face was pale and his chin scumbled with a half grown beard, but it was his features that lit first.
“Ivar! It’s Ivar! I knew he would come back!” He hobbled forward; something was wrong with his right foot, and as soon as Ivar dismounted he flung his arms around him in a warm embrace.
“No time.” Ivar pushed him away. He gauged the heavens and the shifting light that marked the waning afternoon. “We must leave now, while we have the chance. We have an order, sealed by Lady Sabella’s seal and thereby binding. You are exiled from Varre, free to go as long as you cross into Wendar and do not return.”
Some wept, but Biscop Constance in her calm way asked the first, and only, question. “Who has written this false command, knowing themselves a rebel against Lady Sabella? Such an act is treason, punishable by death. Was it one of the clerics I trained? I thought them all exiled from her court.”
“It was Baldwin.”
“Baldwin!” cried Ermanrich.
“Baldwin can’t write,” objected Hathumod from behind him.
“That is enough,” said Constance. “I will need assistance. I cannot ride.”
Ivar nodded. “We have a cart and two mules to draw it. We have mounts for everyone. How are there so few left?”
“There are three out in the woods gathering,” said Constance, “but it is true we are few in number. Sister Nanthild was first to die of the illness. It struck after the night of the wind. We lost half our number. It is only since we left the compound and came to live here that the deaths have ceased. I believe that the well is poisoned. You see how weak we are. If you had not come, Brother Ivar, I fear we would all have perished by summer from starvation. The guards refused to cross the gate or even bring us baskets of grain. The ram died, and the only pregnant ewe miscarried. We have not seen the sun for so many months we have forgotten what it feels like to enjoy its brilliant lamp. Plants cannot flourish without sun. Likewise, rainfall is erratic. God is angry, so I am convinced.”
“We must hurry.” He did not like to think that it might all be for naught, that he might rescue them and yet still fail. The world had so changed that he no longer recognized it. Like a cloudy day, it had gone all shadowed and dim. “Let us go.”
The three gone into the woods to forage were found. The rest had to bundle up their valuable possessions, to fold them into saddlebags and cloth sacks and or toss them into the back of the second cart or over the withers of their mules: blankets, cloaks, tunics, weed hooks, shovels, sickles, and scythes as well as awls, knives, kitchen implements, and a salt cellar; a silver ewer and four copper basins; needles, skeins of yarn, three spindles, and six fleeces also used for bedding; a leather chest containing the biscop’s scribal tools; two psalters, three Holy Verses, and four other books, one of them a scroll of St. Augustina’s Confessions and another a history of Varren princes. What remained of their stock of dried herbs taken from the infirmary and stored in a small wooden chest. An ivory-and-gold reliquary containing the bones of the left hand of the founder, Queen Gertruda.
They met up with Sergeant Hugo at the gates with daylight to spare and rumbled out through the guards’ encampment in a silent line of riders with the two carts positioned in the middle of the procession. Captain Tammus stared. He seemed ready to spit, but like them, he said nothing. No one, apparently, wanted to risk touching them. Before they’d rolled out of sight, a half dozen guards ran through the open gates to see what they could loot. The last Ivar saw of the gate was the men running back out again with nothing in their hands, scared off, no doubt, by the sight of those forbidding graves.
