A shadow fell across him as the one who'd spoken approached, lit by the rising sun. He blinked his eyes in surprise as they adjusted; he'd come here for solitude, and if anyone else was near he would have expected a woodsman or a ski patrol. Then he could see her. It was a woman of…
I cannot say if she is young or old, or simply ageless, he thought, his mouth going dry. No "Who are you?" he whispered.
She was dressed in a simple belted robe of undyed wool, honestly made but the sort of homespun a peasant's wife would wear, or a village craftsman's, and her hands were work-worn. A long blue mantle rested across her head and shoulders, thrown over one shoulder to frame her features and the waving black hair. The face beneath it was olive-skinned, with a firm curve of nose and great dark eyes that reminded him of the Byzantine mosaics Abbot Dmwoski loved; a Jewish face, kindly and wise and a little sad. Her feet pressed the snow in sandals of goatskin, and a breath of warmer air came with her-air scented with lavender and thyme, a hint of sunny, dusty hillsides and hamlet fires of olive twigs and vine clippings.
"Under my father's roof, they called me the wished-for child. Miriam, in the tongue of my people."
Then he met her eyes, and cried out, throwing up a hand.
So bright, so bright! Like fire!
Like staring into the heart of some great star, burning in the vastness of space, like the sudden shock of being plunged into its furnace heart and transmuted as elements combined and died. Yet there was no pain in it, only a warmth that penetrated to every atom of his being, as if all that he was shone with it. The Light was knowledge; of his self, that showed him every mistake and sin and ignoble failing that had gone into him… yet the light was still there, and had always been, would always be.
And yet she was the peasant woman he had seen, arms stretched a little toward him with the callused palms of her hands upturned.
"Do not be afraid, Karl Bergfried," she said again, using his baptismal name, and the tenderness in her voice was as overwhelming as the light. "You who have been Father in the spirit to my Son's children."
"Lady," he choked, the hand he had put between them slowly dropping to clasp his other, caught between terror and a rush of joy that was like all his homecomings at once, together with what he'd felt when he first raised the Host as a priest. "Lady-"
I am awake, he thought. I am more awake than I have ever been.
Every particle of snow, every roughness of bark or breath of air upon his skin seemed to glow. Time passed in a drumbeat of seconds, sounding as if its hooves would shake loose the mountains and break the sky, as if the stuff of existence itself creaked at the strain.
I am more myself than ever before, but I am faded to a shadow and the world is an image cast upon silver glass!
"Lady of Sorrows, Queen of Angels," he said, and tears ran down his cheeks, startlingly cold against the flushed skin. "I am not worthy-a miracle-"
Her lips curved. "And yet my Son's blood was shed for you, child of Eve," she said, the smile taking away the chiding. "And have you not been the instrument of miracle, the earthly bread and wine becoming His blood and flesh in your hands? Have you not granted forgiveness in His name?"
Ignatius nodded. "What must I do?" he whispered.
"You will be tested beyond what you can bear, unless you throw yourself upon Him and His love. In them is strength beyond all the deceits and wickedness you have seen; strength to put them behind you."
"Do I do right to follow the Princess?" he said.
"To whom did you promise obedience, under God?"
"To the head of my Order, and through him to the princes of the Church and the Holy Father."
The blue-mantled head nodded. "Humanity has suffered the fire from the sky, a punishment greater than the Deluge," she said. "But even in the Father's anger there is always mercy. And my Son is thrifty; He uses what is to hand. The young woman your earthly superior entrusted to your care also serves His purposes; guard her then in the trials she will face, with sword and counsel of the world and of the Spirit. In service to her you serve me, and through me the Most High. You shall be my knight, Karl Bergfried!"
She rested one hand on the cross-hilt of his sword; the other reached out and touched him gently on the brow, and the universe dissolved in song.
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Right face!" Martin Thurston shouted, as the Portlander knights loomed up again out of the dust to the northward; he'd learned their trumpet calls today. "Hold hard, the fighting Sixth! Prepare to receive cavalry!"
The battalion turned front and snapped its shields up as the Boisean tubae screamed, a motion like the bristling of a hawk's feathers.
"Oooo-rah!" the long guttural shout went up, as the soldiers of the Republic braced for contact. "USA! USA!"
"Haro! Portland! Holy Mary for Portland!" answered them from behind the couched lances and painted shields.
Even then, the war cry irritated him. They were fighting for their respective rulers, not for the putative mother of a hypothetical God. Though he supposed Sandra, the bitch! just didn't compare as a battle shout.
Centurions stalked between the ranks, and the optios in the rear braced their brass-tipped staffs against men's backs, firming the line and giving that little extra sense of solidity in the chaos and whirling terror that were a foot-soldier's view of combat. Pila jutted out between the locked shields, and the first rank knelt to brace the butts against the hard gritty soil.
Seconds later the lances struck, slamming through the hard plywood and sheet-steel with huge crack! sounds, bowling men over or punching through their body armor. Shafts cracked across, pinwheeling up in fragments through the mist of powdered soil. More pila arched forward over the front rank's heads, and men pushed forward to take the place of the fallen, punching at the metal-clad heads of the horses with the bosses and steel-rimmed edges of their great curved shields, stabbing with their swords, trying to swarm the horsemen under now that they were halted. Men and horses alike were armored animals who cursed and struggled and bled and screamed, killed and died, blind with sweat and blood and the dirt churned up by the hooves and boots all the long day, voices croaking with thirst.
The knights' long blades and spiked war-hammers slammed down, and the destriers reared and struck with feet like milling clubs; the ugly crunching sounds when they struck the bodies of men were audible even through the huge scrap-metal-and-riot blur of noise. Here and there a mount went down, or a man, with a pila-point sticking from a joint in the armor or from the horses' vulnerable bellies. Martin watched as a dismounted knight swung his longsword in both hands, and three Boise troopers struck in trained unison, one to block the blade, the other two stabbing with the flickering speed of a shrike snapping its beak forward, probing for the weak points in the armor. Steel sparked on steel, and then the plumed helmet wavered and went down…
The oliphants shrieked again, a higher note than the brass horns the Boise men used, and the men-at-arms backed their horses and turned, cantering out of catapult range and then walking their mounts; infantry couldn't force horsemen to fight if they didn't want to. When they were a thousand yards away they turned and waited; he could see ambulances coming forward for their wounded, and Remounts. Goddamn them, they've still got fresh destriers ready! They must have been breeding and training them ever since the Change; it'd cost a fortune.
Boise's light horse were trying to re-form their tattered screen between his flank and the Portlander lancers. His head swiveled eastward, ahead. There his men had been steadily chewing their way through the Portland Protective Association's infantry, like a saw through hard wood… but they'd had to halt while he refused the flank to take the attack of the heavy horse.