The Smoke on the Eastern Road

A Note on the History

The Rise of the Franks opens in A.D. 899 and follows the East Frankish realm through the fragile years of the late reign of Arnulf of Carinthia and the succession of the boy-king Louis the Child. The Magyar raids of the late ninth and early tenth centuries — which had reached the Enns river and briefly beyond — are the historical backdrop; the specific raid depicted in these pages is imagined.

Árpád the Old, great prince of the Magyars, is historical, as are the tribal names Kér, Kürt, Jenő, Tarján, and Nyék. Hugh of Lotharingia — the protagonist — is an invention of the series; no duke of that name reigned at Metz in this period. The series takes further liberties with the Carolingian succession across the later volumes, treating the chronology as an alternate-history variant.

Part I — The Smoke

PROLOGUE

The Abbey of St. Goar

The Abbey of St. Goar, on the Rhine — Autumn, A.D. 899

Brother Wigbert was pulling his beets from the cold black earth when he heard the rider come up the river road.

He straightened slowly, a hand at the small of his back. Sixty-one winters had settled into his spine and they made no secret of themselves on wet afternoons. The beets were good this year — fist-sized, purple-dark, clotted with soil that smelled of the iron in the Rhine mud. He had a half-bushel already heaped in the willow basket at his knee. The lay brothers would come before vespers to carry them up to the kitchens.

The rider was coming hard. That was the first thing. A horse moved differently when its rider meant only to arrive; the hoofbeats were uneven, hurried, the horse worked beyond any sensible pace for the dusty washboard road that followed the river down from Bacharach. The second thing was that the rider was alone. No servant, no outrider, no company of any kind. Wigbert had been sub-prior at St. Goar for nineteen years and he had seen messengers arrive alone perhaps four times in all of those years, and each time the news had been very bad.

He set the trowel down on the lip of his basket and walked to the gate of the herb garden. His knees cracked. From the garden the path wound up past the smokehouse and the lay dormitory and onto the forecourt of the abbey proper, where the little stone church squatted with its red-tiled roof against the gray bulk of the cliff behind it. The Rhine ran past twenty yards below, cold and slow in the October light. Three fishermen’s skiffs lay tied at the landing. A scrap of woodsmoke drifted out from the kitchen chimney.

The rider came up off the river road at a gallop.

Wigbert saw him clear now — a young man in a dun cloak, mud to his thighs, his horse flecked white. The horse was finished. It would founder within the hour. The rider did not appear to care. He pulled up at the gate and all but fell off the saddle onto the packed earth of the forecourt, his legs buckling and locking and buckling again as they took his weight for the first time in hours. The horse stood with its head down and its ribs heaving.

“Abbot,” the young man said. “I want the abbot.”

“The abbot is at Metz, at synod,” Wigbert said. “I am the sub-prior. What news do you carry?”

The young man looked at him a long moment. His eyes were glassy. There was a streak of something on his cheek that was not mud and not tears — some black mixture of soot and river water that had dried where it fell. He was perhaps twenty. A gold cross on a leather thong hung at his throat.

“Father,” he said, and then his knees did buckle, and Wigbert got a hand under his elbow and brought him down softly to the dirt.

“Boy,” Wigbert said. “Boy. Breathe. What news?”

“The Ungri.”

Wigbert’s hands went cold. He had not heard that word spoken aloud in six years, not since the last raid had pushed as far west as Worms and then been turned back at the Main by a countship Wigbert could not now recall the name of. He had been forty miles from Worms that spring. He remembered how the sky had been.

“Where,” he said.

“Bacharach,” the young man said. “Yesterday. Before dawn. They came up the Nahe out of the dark. They —“ he was crying now, not knowing it — “they killed Father Willehad with his own crozier. They killed — they killed everyone. They took the altar plate. They took Sister Matilda and the little girls and — Father, they are coming here. They ride. They ride like nothing. I took the fastest horse. I took him out the back gate. I rode all night. I rode past the burning.”

Wigbert sat on his heels in the dirt with his hand on the young man’s shoulder and tried to make his own breathing slow.

Bacharach is eight miles, he thought. Eight miles up the river. They will have come to the fork at Oberwesel by now and they will have seen the smoke of our kitchens.

“How many,” he said.

“A hundred. Two hundred. I don’t — father, I could not count them. I was hiding in the rushes when they came. I saw torches. I saw them on the road. They moved like water. Like rain. They don’t — they don’t ride like men. They ride standing.”

“Stand up,” Wigbert said. He got his arm under the boy’s and brought him upright. “Go to the bell. Ring the great bell until I tell you to stop. Go.”

The young man stumbled toward the church. Wigbert turned and walked — not ran; old men do not run, and running was not what was needed now — up the short flight of stone steps to the refectory door and opened it and called. Brother Thietmar was at the reading desk. Brother Adalhelm was sweeping. The two of them looked up at him and he did not have to say anything, because Wigbert’s face by this hour must have been carrying the news. Both of them crossed themselves at the same moment, as if they had practiced it.

“Magyars at Bacharach,” Wigbert said. “They will be here tonight or at first light. Adalhelm. Go to the landing and get the fishermen off the river and up the hill. Thietmar. The reliquaries. Take the boys and put everything into the grain cellar and pack the straw over it. Go now. Both of you.”

He did not say go with God because God, Wigbert suspected, would have His own work that night and would not have the hand to spare.

The bell began to ring.

He walked alone up the long nave of the little stone church and past the chancel into the sacristy. From the chest under the vestment bench he took the cedarwood box that held the parish register and the charters and the small leather pouch of silver deniers the abbey kept against bad years. He put all of it into a linen sack. He slung the sack over his shoulder. He took up the silver pyx in which the Body of the Lord was housed in its little gold dish and he kissed it once through the cloth and tucked it into his sleeve.

Then he walked back out into the forecourt.

The bell was still ringing. He could see the lay brothers running from the fields, black habits flapping. He could see women, too — the laundress, the cook’s wife from the kitchen — and their children. A dozen of them. Thirty, maybe. The abbey’s living souls.

He could see, also, the smoke on the eastern road.

It was not much yet. A thin gray line above the trees, to the south-east, on the ridge where the track came down from the uplands. It would be Oberwesel. Oberwesel was burning. Oberwesel had six houses and a small mill. It would have burned very quickly.

Wigbert set the linen sack down on the cobbles of the forecourt and took the pyx out of his sleeve and set it on top of the sack. He stood for a moment with his eyes closed. His lips moved. He said the short private prayer he had said every morning for forty-one years. Then he opened his eyes and went back into the nave of the church and took the pyx and the sack with him.

He put the sack into the grain cellar under the straw, with Thietmar’s reliquaries. He put the pyx into the tabernacle and closed the little door and locked it and put the key on its thong around his neck under his habit.

Then he went out again to the forecourt, where the fishermen’s bill-hook that Adalhelm had brought up from the landing stood thrust into the dirt by the gate. Wigbert took up the bill-hook and he stood in the gate of the abbey with it held across his chest. He was sixty-one and his hands on the haft were steady.

They came at dusk, over the ridge road out of the south-east, and he saw them first as small dark shapes strung out along the cart-track under a sky that had gone the color of old pewter. They were moving at a canter. Not a gallop. A canter. That was what terrified him. Men who came at a gallop wanted something. Men who came at a canter knew they had all the time they would need.

There were more than a hundred.

The lead riders were small — smaller than he had expected, wiry on wiry ponies. Their coats were the color of the dust they rode through. They had short curved bows strung in their left hands and short straight sabres at their hips and round leather shields on their backs. The one at the front wore a cap with a bright iron spike. He was laughing at something. Wigbert could hear the laugh before he could see the teeth.

The riders reached the bottom of the ridge track and began to come up the road along the river. They spread out as they came. Fifty yards out from the gate, the lead rider lifted a horn from under his cloak and blew three short blasts. Another horn answered from the ridge above. A third from behind.

The bill-hook was a tool for pulling reeds.

Wigbert was astonished to find that he was not frightened. Whatever he had expected to feel in this hour, it was not this. His heart was beating, certainly; he could hear it in his ears. But he felt — and he noted this, he actually noted this, in the cool disinterested part of a mind that had sometimes caught him off guard during matins — calm. Interested. He watched them come.

The lead rider did not slow at the gate. He came through the gate at a canter with his sabre already drawn and the first thing he did was cut Wigbert’s head half from his neck in a single long motion that carried the blade almost back to the rider’s own shoulder on the opposite side. Wigbert was dead before he hit the ground. He never felt the second cut, which took the bill-hook out of his hand and part of the hand with it.

The horsemen came in after him.

Brother Thietmar died at the door of the grain cellar with his hand still on the latch. Brother Adalhelm died on the landing, in the shallows, with a Magyar arrow through his neck. The laundress and the cook’s wife and all of the children over the age of five were roped together by their wrists and led down to the river and loaded into the fishermen’s skiffs and rowed upstream, toward Bacharach, toward a road that Brother Wigbert had never walked. The children under five were not worth the trouble of the rope and they were left.

The Magyars burned the church at moonrise.

The smoke was visible from the opposite bank of the Rhine for two days. Travelers reported it at Koblenz on the third day. The news, borne by riders on fresh horses at every post-house of the royal road, reached Aachen on the fifth.

The king read it without expression, laid the dispatch face down on the oak of his writing-table, and rang a small silver bell for his chancellor.

* * *

CHAPTER ONE

The Drill-Yard

Aachen — April, A.D. 900

The lance was too long for him by four inches and Hugh had known it since the first strike.

He had taken it anyway, out of the rack by the south wall of the drill-yard, because it was the lance he ought to have been able to handle and because Master Ostger was watching him from under the arcade with his arms folded the way a butcher folds his arms in front of a side of beef he has already priced. Hugh was sixteen. Hugh had been riding full courses in the yard since he was twelve. The lance in his hand was not too long for a sixteen-year-old man of ordinary height.

Hugh was not of ordinary height. He had grown two inches in the autumn and the winter had been hungry and his shoulders had not yet caught up to his arms, and the lance — the heavy ash shaft with its iron socketed head and its leather grip wrapped for a man with palms thicker than his own — the lance was four inches too long. He had known it at the first strike, when the weight of it had carried three fingers of the head past the straw-stuffed ring at the top of the quintain and the torque had spun him half off his saddle and thumped his right knee into the cantle hard enough that he had bitten the inside of his cheek.

He had turned his horse at the far end of the yard and come down the track at the canter for the second pass and he had adjusted. Not by much. By a grip. His right hand had closed a half-palm further back on the shaft, and he had tightened his shoulder, and he had brought the head of the lance down to where it wanted to be rather than where it ought to have been, and he had driven it clean through the center of the ring and taken the ring off the quintain and ridden past with the ring riding down the shaft to his glove. He had laid the ring at Master Ostger’s feet at the end of the run and Master Ostger had not said a word.

This was the sixth ring.

He was setting up for the seventh.

Across the yard, on the opposite track, Prince Lothar was doing slow figures-of-eight between two ring-posts on a dapple gray gelding that cost more than any horse Hugh had ever ridden. Lothar’s lance was of ordinary length. Lothar was twenty-two. Lothar had ridden at his father’s right hand in the royal review on Easter Monday, in full mail and a blue cloak, and the city had cheered him as the future of the Middle Kingdom. He was a handsome man and he rode well. He was taking the rings with the same slow, deliberate care he took his meat with at the high table.

Hugh did not look at him. He had trained himself not to.

He turned his mare — her name was Hegna, which was Saxon and meant nothing in particular — and he set her up on the far line of the track and clucked her forward. The April sun fell cold across the yard. The yard was sanded and swept; Master Ostger kept it the way an altar was kept. Over the low wall, the east flank of the royal hall showed its red tile and copper gutters, and beyond them the octagon of Charlemagne’s dome rose into the pale sky — a building Hugh’s grandfathers’ grandfathers had raised and that no living mason in Aachen could have matched.

Hegna came down the track.

Hugh set his shoulder. He moved his right hand another quarter-inch back on the leather. He slid the lance a fraction forward in his grip — he was compensating now both for the length of the shaft and for the slight camber of the track, which sloped an inch to the west of true. He had noticed the camber on the third pass. He had not mentioned it.

The ring was in front of him. He took it. The leather-wrapped shaft sang, a low thrum, and Hugh felt the small perfect snap of it along his wrist. The ring rode down to his glove. He brought the lance up, reined in, walked Hegna around the post and returned at the walk, and laid the ring at Master Ostger’s feet on top of the others.

Master Ostger looked at the pile of rings and then at Hugh.

“Eight more,” he said.

Hugh reset.

Master Ostger was seventy and he had taught the princes of three reigns. He had taught Arnulf himself, in the bad years before Arnulf’s father took the crown. He had taught Lothar and Carloman. He had been teaching Hugh since Hugh was eleven, which was a year younger than was proper. Nobody at the court had ever clarified why Master Ostger had taken a bastard early, and Hugh had never asked.

Master Ostger had a face like carved wood and one eye, the left, that had been white since a lance-point had taken it at a tournament in Metz in the year of Hugh’s birth. He wore the same dun cloak in every weather. He smelled always of leather oil and horse.

“Your right shoulder is high,” he said, now, as Hegna came back around.

“I know.”

“It wasn’t high on the first ring. It is now.”

“I have tired.”

Master Ostger looked at the pile of rings.

“You are tired,” he said, “six rings in.”

“Yes.”

“The enemy will be tired also,” Master Ostger said. “Keep the shoulder down. Eight more.”

Hugh reset.

He was halfway through the next pass when the drum went.

It sounded from the direction of the palace gate — three beats, three, three — the royal summons to council. Hugh felt the drum in his teeth before he understood what it was, and Hegna felt it too; her ears came back, then forward, then back again. He reined her to the walk. Across the yard, Lothar had pulled up. Master Ostger had not moved.

The drum went again.

“That’s for the king,” Lothar said, across the yard. His voice was pleasant. It was a pleasant voice even in shouting. “Come, Master Ostger, come. The king has dispatched couriers, the couriers have returned. Somewhere east of the Rhine a duke is drunk or a cow is sickly. Come come, come come.” He was walking his gray toward the opposite gate. His squire came trotting from the arcade to take the lance from his hand.