“Aye.” As the horse rose, Argyros cut the left stirrup-leather with his knife. Hilda sat up, clutching at her leg. Beneath splattered muck, her face was gray. She had bitten her lip in pain; there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth.
“Stay as still as you can,” Argyros ordered, using his dagger to slit her trouserleg. He saw with relief that no bone was poking through the flesh; in this filth such a wound would surely have rotted. But her calf was swelling as he watched, and he had heard the break himself.
“Bad?” Wighard asked. Argyros told him in a few words. The Anglelander nodded. “Let’s get her under a roof, then. I’ve set a few bones in my time.” To Hilda he said, “I’m sorry, chick; we’re going to have to move you. It’ll hurt.”
“It hurts already,” she got out.
“I know, lass, I know.” Wighard turned to Argyros. “We’ve nothing for a proper splint. I’ll tie her legs together, and we’ll carry her. Lucky she’s short; we can keep her feet from dragging on the ground.”
“Nothing better to do,” the magistrianos agreed. Hilda gasped as they lifted her. Argyros could see her clamping her mouth shut against a scream. “Brave girl,” he said; she was taking it like a soldier. She managed the ghost of a smile. “See, I have my arm around you after all, though maybe not the way you wanted.”
Leading their horses, they started slowly down the street. By good fortune, there was a hostel close by. Its proprietress was a plump widow named Gerda. She clucked at their draggled state, but Argyros’s good Roman gold softened her remarkably. A nomisma went much further among the Franco-Saxons than in the Empire.
They eased Hilda down onto a table. Wighard produced a small leather bag full of sand and sapped her behind the ear. She sagged into unconsciousness. As he had said, her uncle knew how to treat injuries like hers. He skillfully aligned the fracture and splinted her leg between boards padded with rags. “She’ll heal straight, I think,” he said at last. “Maybe not even a limp.”
“Good,” Argyros said, and meant it. He honestly liked Hilda, even if she would not give him her body. But there was also still the mission to consider. He looked Wighard in the face. “We need to talk, you and I.”
In the end all three of them hashed it out in one of the pair of upstairs rooms they rented. Hilda lay on a straw pallet; Wighard and Argyros drew rickety stools up next to her.
“Do not think ill of me, I beg you,” the magistrianos said, “but I plan to push on to St. Gall. If I wait for you to mend, Hilda, snow will close off the southern passes and lock me away from the Empire till spring.”
“Quite right,” she said. Her voice was blurry; she had drunk two winejars down to dull the fire in her leg. But her wits still worked clearly. “Uncle, you must go with him.”
“And leave you here alone? Are you daft, girl?”
“This Gerda likes money,” Hilda shrugged. “She’ll care for me if we pay her well, I think, and I can make myself useful to her, doing accounts and such. No sense your staying here because of me.”
“And what will I tell your father when he asks how I watched over you?”
“What will you tell King Oswy when he asks why Angleland has lost another dozen ships, or two, or three?” she retorted. “Winter will not wait for you any more than for Basil. I can be getting better while you and he go on; maybe when you get back I’ll be able to travel again. And it’s more likely you’ll succeed working together than separately.”
The Anglelander made a sour face. “Let me nose around town tomorrow,” he said grudgingly. “If this innkeeper wench has a decent name for herself, then maybe ...”
On investigation, Gerda proved acceptable as caretaker for an invalid; her nickname in Turic was
“Mother.” “Yes, she likes her silver up front, does the Mother,” said a miller who sold her flour, “but she’d not harm a flea.”
“That I know,” Argyros said, scratching. But no hostel in which he’d ever stayed, in the Empire or out, had been free of bugs.
Despite testimonials, Wighard was still fretting when he and the magistrianos rode east past the cathedral honoring Turic’s three famous martyrs, Felix, Regula, and their servant Exuperantius. But he rode; Hilda’s invocation of King Oswy’s name might have been a spell in and of itself.
“Necessity is the master of us all,” Argyros consoled his companion as they clattered over the old Roman fortified bridge to the left bank of the Lindimat. “What would you be doing for her had you stayed, past fetching porridge and helping her use the chamberpot?”
“Nothing, I suppose, but I mislike it all the same.” Wighard’s eyes went to the foothills ahead, their flanks dusky green with thick forests of fir and pine. Bare gray granite, some peaks snow-tipped even now, loomed in the distance. The Anglelander shivered. “I’d not like passing a winter here, though.”
“Nor I,” Argyros said. Unspoken went the other thing that bound the two of them together: their common desire for the Franco-Saxons’ secret. Without Hilda, Wighard would be hard-pressed to ferret it out for himself, so he depended heavily on Argyros. For his part, the magistrianos knew that if he could solve the mystery and get out of St. Gall with it, the Anglelander’s less intellectual talents would make escape more likely.
Late the next afternoon, Wighard pulled off the road into a patch of woods less than a mile short of the monastery. “Here I stay,” he declared. “If you’re bold enough to stick your head in the bear’s mouth, why, go on and good luck to you. As for me, I give you ten days. After that I go back to Turic and see to Hilda.”
Argyros clasped his hand. “You’ll not be caught, or starve?”
“An old poacher like me? Never. I’d twenty times sooner brave the forest than chase after demons the way you are.” He paused and eyed the magistrianos anxiously. “We still share, not so? Should you find the spell and I help you get away with it, we share?”
“If there’s a spell to find, you’ll have it from me,” Argyros declared, though his tongue was more certain than his heart.
He clucked his horse forward. Behind him, Wighard muttered, “I’d better,” and followed that half-threat with low-voiced prayers—or were they heathen charms?
A brown-robed monk standing sentry on the wall hailed the magistrianos. That robe and the man’s tonsure and shaven face reminded Argyros he was in a foreign land. The monks he knew wore black and kept their beards and hair.
He shouted back, once more calling himself Petro the amber trader. “You’re faring all the way to Lithuania?” the monk said. “A long journey, that. May it be profitable for you.”
“My thanks,” Argyros replied, and asked if he might rest a few days at St. Gall. Receiving permission, he dismounted and led his horse into the monastery.
A large guesthouse for nobles and other prominent guests stood to the left of the entrance road; to the right were a smaller house for their servants and a building that lodged the monastery’s shepherds and sheep. All were of timber, in the northern style, with steeply pitched roofs to shed snow during the fierce mountain winters.
The entranceway led to the western porch of the monastery church, where, Argyros knew, all visitors were received. The porch lay between two watchtowers, one dedicated to St. Michael, the other to St. Gabriel. The church itself was a basilica, long and rectangular. Most churches in the Empire were built to the more modern cruciform pattern, but the timber-roofed stone building had an archaic grandeur; Argyros felt transported back to the early days of Christianity.