Chapter 75: The Cartulary of Thawed Roads

The thaw came to Paderborn like a debtor who had promised to pay and then arrived late, apologetic, and smelling of wet earth. Aldric woke to the sound of water running everywhere—down the palisade walls, through the churned mud of the horse lines, dripping from the eaves of his tent in a steady, maddening rhythm. He lay still for a long moment, listening, and considered the possibility that the entire camp was dissolving around him and that if he simply remained in his blankets, he might dissolve with it and wake up in the Vosges.

The tent flap opened. Gerold entered with a bowl of something that steamed and smelled faintly of onions.

"You are awake," the Saxon said.

"I am not," Aldric said. "You are imagining me. Go away and imagine someone else."

Gerold set the bowl on the camp table, which was a plank on two barrels, and stood dripping. "The Emperor's messengers have been asking for you since before dawn. They have asked three times. I told them you were praying."

Aldric sat up. "You told them I was praying?"

"It was the best lie I could think of."

"You are a terrible liar, Gerold."

"I know," the Saxon said, without evident regret. "That is why I keep you."

Aldric ate the onions. They were bad, but they were hot, and hot was a kind of mercy in a camp where the ground had turned to soup and the sky had forgotten what blue looked like. While he ate, he considered the sheet of parchment he had left on the table the night before, where he had written Rome at the top and then begun to count the ways he could lose.

He had filled the page and part of another. He had counted twenty-three ways to fail. He had counted the Saxon hostages who might riot if the Emperor left the marches too lightly garrisoned. He had counted the Bavarian bishops who would resent the expense of an imperial progress through their lands. He had counted the Byzantine envoys who would read a crown as an insult, the Roman factions who would read it as a gift, the Frankish nobles who would read it as an invitation to rebellion. He had counted Hildegard, who was counting something he could not see. He had counted Rotrude, who was counting him.

Twenty-three ways to lose. And yet, when he had finished, he had not written down a single plan to win.

Because winning, he was beginning to understand, was the problem. Every time he won, Charlemagne found a new use for him. Every time he solved one problem, the Emperor handed him a larger one, as if competence were a disease that bred more work. The only true victory was to become useless. And he had spent so many years being useful, in spite of himself, that he had forgotten how to be anything else.

He finished the onions and pulled on his boots, which had dried stiff and cracked at the seams. Outside, the camp was a study in gray and brown—gray sky, brown mud, gray smoke, brown men. The snowmelt had turned the whole of Paderborn into a single enormous puddle, and the Emperor's army moved through it with the resigned patience of men who had long ago accepted that the world was mostly water and discomfort.

The Emperor was in the great hall, which was a hall only by courtesy, being a timbered building with a thatched roof that leaked in six places. Charlemagne stood at the center of it, surrounded by a ring of dripping retainers, studying a map spread across a table. He looked up when Aldric entered, and his eyes—pale, hooded, unnervingly direct—narrowed with what might have been amusement.

"Ah," the Emperor said. "The prayers are answered. Our lord of the Vosges has risen from his knees."

"I was not praying," Aldric said. "I was sleeping."

"Then your prayers were answered anyway. Come here."

Aldric came. On the map, someone had drawn the route south—down through the Alps, across the Lombard plain, to Rome. The ink had run in places where the leak had dripped on it, and the line through the mountains looked less like a road than a wound.

"The passes will be clear by May," Charlemagne said. "We march in April. I want you to ride ahead. Not with the army—before it. You will go to Rome and prepare the ground."

Aldric's stomach, which had been cautiously optimistic about the onions, turned over. "Prepare the ground," he repeated.

"You will speak to the Pope's men. You will speak to the Roman nobles. You will find out who is for us and who is against us and who is for sale. You will count the cost of every man, every horse, every loaf of bread between here and the Lateran. And you will do it quietly, so that no one knows the Emperor's hand is in it until the hand is already closed."

"Your Majesty," Aldric said, "I am a minor lord with a vineyard I have not seen in four years. I have no experience in the politics of Rome. I have no friends among the papal court. I have no—"

"You have a mind," Charlemagne said. "And you have a talent for being underestimated. I have watched you, Aldric. You do not seek power. You do not seek glory. You do not even seek gold, as far as I can tell. You seek only to be left alone. Such men are rare, and such men are useful, because they cannot be bought—only borrowed. I am borrowing you. You will go to Rome."

The Emperor said it without heat, without threat, as if he were remarking on the weather. And that, Aldric realized, was the most dangerous thing about him. He did not need to threaten. He simply rearranged the world until your only choices were his choices.

"May I ask a question, Your Majesty?"

"You may."

"What if I fail?"

Charlemagne smiled, and it was not a kind smile. "Then you will have failed in Rome, and I will be very disappointed, and you will still not be allowed to go home. The only difference between success and failure, Aldric, is whether you fail in comfort or in disgrace. I advise success."

He turned back to the map, and the audience was over.

---

Outside, the rain had softened to a mist. Aldric stood in the mud and watched the camp wake around him—cooks and farriers and men-at-arms, all of them moving with the dull purpose of those who had no choice. He thought of Hildegard's arithmetic, of the writ of immunity still unearned, of the single word he had written at the top of his page the night before.

Rome.

He had counted twenty-three ways to lose. But he had not yet counted the ways he could win and still go home. That, he suspected, was a sum that did not exist.

Gerold appeared at his elbow, dripping. "You look like a man who has been told to do something stupid."

"I have been told to go to Rome," Aldric said. "Which is the same thing, only farther."

"Then we ride south."

"We ride south." Aldric pulled his cloak tighter, and water ran down the back of his neck. "But first we ride to the shrine of Saint Bernard. I need to ask the abbess a question."

Gerold's face, already weathered into a permanent expression of doubt, grew darker. "The abbess who tricked you into this?"

"The same. I need to know what she is counting."

They walked together toward the horse lines, where the animals stood hock-deep in mud and regarded the world with the weary contempt of creatures who had seen too much of it. Aldric swung into the saddle, and the horse shifted under him, and for a moment he felt the old, familiar pull—the road unrolling before him, the vineyards receding behind, the whole of Christendom arranging itself into a problem he had not asked to solve.

He looked south, toward the Alps, toward Rome, toward the crown that would be bought with blood and bread and the labor of men like him.

And he thought, with a clarity that felt almost like prophecy: The Emperor does not want a crown. He wants a story. And I am the one who has to write it.

He kicked the horse forward, into the mist, and the road of thawed mud opened before him like a mouth.