Chapter 78: The Cartulary of Thawed Crowns

The thaw came late that year, and with it the news that Charlemagne would enter Rome before the feast of Saint Martin.

Aldric heard it first from a Frankish courier who had ridden his horse to death and arrived at the camp outside Paderborn with mud to his knees and the Emperor's seal in his fist. He read the dispatch twice, then a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less inconvenient. They did not. The Pope had agreed to the coronation. The date was set. The road to Rome was no longer a threat but a command.

He found Gerold sharpening his sword by the fire, which was the Saxon's way of expressing displeasure with the world.

"We leave at dawn," Aldric said.

Gerold did not look up. "You said that yesterday."

"Yesterday I was being optimistic."

"You are never optimistic."

"I am a man of many surprises." Aldric crouched beside the fire and warmed his hands. The spring melt had turned the camp to a swamp, and his boots had not been dry in a fortnight. "The Emperor will enter Rome in November. We are to be there before him."

Gerold tested the edge of his blade with his thumb. "To plan his triumph."

"To plan his triumph," Aldric agreed. "And to ensure that nothing goes wrong."

"And what of your own plans?"

Aldric was silent a moment. The fire crackled and spat, and somewhere beyond the tents a horse whickered in the dark. "My plans," he said at last, "have a way of becoming the Emperor's plans. It is a defect in my character."

"It is a defect in your luck," Gerold said. "There is a difference."

Rotrude found him later, as he was packing his saddlebags by torchlight. She had a way of appearing when he least wanted company and most needed it, which he had long suspected was not coincidence but calculation.

"You look troubled, my lord."

"I look cold," Aldric said. "There is a difference."

She smiled and settled onto a camp stool, drawing her cloak around her. In the torchlight she looked older than her years, and sharper, and Aldric was reminded that this was a woman who had grown up in her father's shadow and learned to read the shadows of others.

"The Pope has agreed," she said. "You know what that means."

"It means your father will be crowned Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, and the world will never be the same."

"It means," Rotrude said, "that my father will no longer be merely a king. He will be the equal of the Emperor in Constantinople. He will be the protector of the Church, the heir of Rome, the anointed of God." She paused. "And he will remember every man who helped him rise—and every man who tried to hold him back."

Aldric fastened his saddlebag and looked at her. "Are you warning me, Princess?"

"I am telling you," she said, "that the writ of immunity in your bag is worth less than the parchment it is written on. My father will not let you go. Not now. Not when he needs you most."

"Then I will have to make myself unnecessary."

"You have been trying that for eight years."

"And I have failed," Aldric said. "Spectacularly. But failure is a teacher, and I am an attentive student."

Rotrude rose, and for a moment her expression softened into something almost like sympathy. "My father once told me that the best way to control a man is to give him what he wants. But the second-best way is to make him want what you give him." She turned toward the tent flap. "He has been using the second method on you for years, Aldric. And you have been letting him."

She left before he could answer, which was perhaps for the best, because he had no answer to give.

---

They rode south at dawn, following the old Roman road through the Lech valley toward the Alps. The snow was melting on the peaks, and the rivers ran high and brown with silt. The army moved in a long column, banners snapping in the cold wind, and Aldric rode near the rear with Gerold and a handful of guards, watching the mountains grow larger with every league.

He had crossed the Alps once before, as a young man, on his way to study in Italy. He had been full of ambition then, or what passed for it, and the world had seemed wide and full of possibility. Now he crossed them again with a saddlebag full of documents and a heart full of resignation, and the mountains looked exactly the same.

They stopped at a monastery in the foothills, where the monks fed them barley soup and hard bread and asked no questions. Aldric sat by the window and watched the sun set behind the peaks, and thought about Hildegard.

She had told him to ride for Rome. She had given him the parchment, and the parchment had given him a plan, and the plan had given him hope. But hope, he had learned, was a trap. Hope was what made men climb mountains and cross oceans and die in faraway lands. Hope was what made them believe that the path of least resistance might one day lead them home.

He had stopped believing in hope somewhere around Regensburg. Now he believed in arithmetic—the cold, precise arithmetic of survival. And the arithmetic told him that the only way out of the Emperor's service was through it. He had to make the coronation so costly, so complicated, so fraught with peril, that Charlemagne would have no choice but to let him go.

It was a good plan. It was Hildegard's plan. And it had one flaw, which he had been trying not to think about.

It assumed that Charlemagne could be outmaneuvered.

---

The next morning, as they prepared to cross the pass, a messenger arrived from Rome.

He was a young cleric, thin and windburned, and he carried a letter sealed with the Pope's own signet. Aldric broke the seal with trembling fingers—not from cold, though the morning was bitter—and read the words in the grey light of dawn.

Then he read them again.

"What is it?" Gerold asked.

Aldric folded the letter carefully and tucked it into his sleeve. His face was very still, which was how Gerold knew something was wrong. He had known Aldric long enough to recognize the calm that came before the storm.

"The Pope is dead," Aldric said.

Gerold blinked. "Dead?"

"Three weeks ago. In Rome. The letter is from his chamberlain." He looked up at the mountains, at the pass that led to Italy, at the road that had seemed so clear only yesterday. "They have elected a new Pope. A man named Leo."

"Leo," Gerold repeated. "Do we know him?"

"No," Aldric said. "But I have a feeling we are about to."

He turned his horse toward the pass, and the column followed, and behind them the valley lay green and quiet in the morning light. But Aldric did not look back. He was thinking of Hildegard's arithmetic, and the price of the crown, and the strange, terrible fact that history did not wait for men who wanted to retire from it.

The road to Rome was paved with ashes. And somewhere ahead, in the marble halls of the Lateran, a new Pope was already making plans of his own.

Aldric had a coronation to remember. But first, he had a Pope to meet.

And he had never forgotten a face in his life.