Chapter 21: The Road to Paderborn (II)
The dawn came grey and cold, the kind of morning that seeped into a man’s bones and made him question every choice that had led him to sleep on the ground in the first place. Aldric sat on a moss-covered log at the edge of the imperial camp, a half-eaten heel of bread in his hand, watching the cooks coax reluctant flames from damp wood. The air smelled of horse, smoke, and the particular misery of an army on the march.
Gerold appeared at his side with the silence of a man who had learned that sound was a weapon. He carried two leather cups of something steaming and thrust one into Aldric’s free hand.
“Mulled wine,” Gerold said. “The Emperor’s own stores. He says you are to drink it before the chill kills your wits.”
“He needs my wits alive,” Aldric muttered, but he drank. The wine was sharp and spiced, and it burned pleasantly on the way down. “Where is he?”
“Gone ahead with the vanguard. He wants Paderborn by nightfall.”
Aldric grunted. Charlemagne moved like a storm, relentless and indifferent to the comfort of lesser men. The Saxon campaigns had taught him that lesson well enough, but the past weeks had sharpened it to a blade’s edge. The Emperor was no longer merely conquering; he was racing toward something, a prize that shimmered on the horizon of Christendom like a crown of fire.
“And the Princess?” Aldric asked.
“She rides with the baggage train,” Gerold said, and there was a hint of amusement in his scarred face. “She claims the horses there are gentler.”
“She claims a great many things.”
Aldric drained the cup and rose, brushing crumbs from his tunic. The writ of immunity sat folded in his saddlebag, still unsigned, still a promise of freedom that grew more distant with every league they traveled south and east. Hildegard’s warning echoed in his mind: *Time is running out.* She had been right, as she always was. He had offered Charlemagne his mind, and the Emperor had taken it without hesitation, folding it into his plans like a sword into a sheath.
But a mind, once offered, could be withdrawn.
Or so Aldric told himself as he walked toward the horse lines, Gerold a silent shadow at his back.
---
The march to Paderborn was brutal in its monotony. The land rolled in grey waves, dotted with the skeletal remains of burned farmsteads and the occasional cluster of stone that had once been a Saxon village. Aldric rode with the supply column, where the dust was thickest and the conversation least demanding. He had learned long ago that invisibility was a gift best cultivated in plain sight.
It did not last.
A messenger found him at midday, a young Frank with a face flushed from riding. He reined in beside Aldric’s mare and thrust a rolled parchment into his hands.
“From the Emperor’s own hand, my lord. He requests your counsel at Paderborn.”
Aldric took the parchment but did not open it. “Requests,” he repeated. “Those are his words?”
The messenger hesitated. “The word was ‘requests,’ my lord. Though the Emperor’s tone suggested… otherwise.”
“It always does.”
He dismissed the messenger and unrolled the parchment. The script was Charlemagne’s own, bold and impatient, the letters slanted as if the pen itself had been in a hurry. It was not a command, exactly. It was an invitation, couched in the language of shared purpose, to join the Emperor that evening to discuss “the final arrangements for our journey to the City of Peter.”
Aldric folded the parchment and tucked it into his belt. Gerold rode up beside him, his eyes scanning the horizon with the practiced wariness of a man who had never quite learned to trust peace.
“What does he want?” Gerold asked.
“What he always wants,” Aldric said. “Everything.”
---
They reached Paderborn as the light failed, the sky bleeding from grey to a bruised purple. The Emperor’s camp sprawled across the plain like a second city, tents and fires and the lowing of cattle stretching to the horizon. Aldric found Charlemagne in a timber hall that had been raised in a single day, its walls still fragrant with green oak.
The Emperor sat at a long table, maps spread before him, a cup of wine at his elbow. He looked up as Aldric entered, and his face split into a grin that was equal parts welcome and calculation.
“Aldric,” Charlemagne said, gesturing to a stool across from him. “Sit. Eat. Drink. We have much to discuss.”
Aldric obeyed, taking a piece of roasted fowl from the platter and tearing into it with more appetite than he felt. The Emperor watched him, his eyes bright in the candlelight.
“You have heard of the Saxons’ latest defiance,” Charlemagne said. It was not a question.
“I have heard they are stubborn,” Aldric said carefully.
“Stubborn is a mild word for men who break their oaths faster than they swear them.” The Emperor’s voice hardened. “Widukind is dead, but his ghost walks the northern marches. I cannot be everywhere at once, and soon I must be in Rome.”
Aldric chewed slowly, buying time. “And you wish me to be somewhere else.”
Charlemagne laughed, a great booming sound that filled the hall. “You see through me, Aldric. That is why I keep you close.” He leaned forward, his massive hands flat on the map. “I need someone to hold the Saxon frontier while I travel south. Someone clever enough to keep the peace without kindling a war.”
“You have counts for that. You have warriors.”
“I have warriors who think with their swords,” Charlemagne said. “I need a mind that thinks with its head. And yours, Aldric, is the sharpest I possess—even when you pretend otherwise.”
Aldric set down the bone and wiped his fingers on his tunic. “If I hold the frontier, I cannot accompany you to Rome. I cannot help you plan the coronation.”
“I have other planners,” the Emperor said. “I have bishops and scholars enough to plot a thousand coronations. What I lack is a man who can keep the north quiet while I am away. You are that man.”
The words hung in the air, and Aldric felt the trap close around him with a click he could almost hear. He had offered his mind to avoid the coronation’s burden, and now Charlemagne was offering him something else entirely: a way out, disguised as a duty. He could spend the winter in the cold, damp north, keeping Saxon chieftains from each other’s throats, while the Emperor rode to Rome and claimed his crown without Aldric’s help.
It was freedom. It was exile. It was exactly what he had always wanted.
And yet.
“The coronation,” Aldric said slowly, “will define your reign for centuries. The Pope’s blessing, the acclamation of the people, the weight of empire on your brow. If it goes wrong, the fault will be laid at your feet, and the enemies you have made will tear the realm apart.”
Charlemagne’s grin faded. “You think it will go wrong?”
“I think it will go as it is planned,” Aldric said. “And I think your planners are men who have never faced a hostile crowd or a doubting bishop. They know the rituals, but they do not know the men who perform them.”
The Emperor was silent for a long moment, his eyes unreadable. Then he laughed again, softer this time, and shook his head.
“You are a curse, Aldric,” he said. “I offer you a quiet post, and you remind me why I cannot spare you.” He reached for his cup and drank deep. “Very well. We will speak of this again in the morning. For now, eat. Rest. Tomorrow we march, and the road to Rome is long.”
Aldric bowed his head and rose, but as he reached the door, Charlemagne’s voice stopped him.
“You know, Aldric, there is a part of me that wishes you were as lazy as you pretend to be. It would make my life considerably simpler.”
Aldric turned, and for the first time in weeks, he smiled. “And there is a part of me, Majesty, that wishes you were as foolish as you sometimes appear. It would make mine considerably happier.”
The Emperor’s laughter followed him out into the cold, and Aldric walked toward his tent with the uneasy feeling that, for all his talk of freedom, he had just taken another step deeper into the gilded cage. Behind him, in the shadows, a figure stirred—Princess Rotrude, wrapped in a woolen cloak, her eyes bright with interest.
“Trouble, my lord?” she asked.
“Always,” Aldric said. “But that is the price of being useful.”
She smiled, and it was not a kind smile. “Then you must be very useful indeed, Lord Aldric. Because the price you are paying grows higher by the day.”
She vanished into the dark, and Aldric stood alone in the torchlight, wondering, not for the first time, whether Hildegard’s arithmetic had been wrong after all.