Chapter 1: The Drainage of the Soul

The autumn rains of 792 had turned the courtyard of the Palatine complex at Aachen into a quagmire of sucking mud and horse dung, and Lord Aldric of the Vosges, standing at the edge of a flooded ditch with a stylus behind his ear, considered this the perfect misery.

“It is a fine day, my lord,” said Gerold the Saxon, his voice a low rumble beneath the drumming of the rain. The scarred warrior stood a full head taller than Aldric, his cloak sodden, his hand resting on a sword hilt that had seen more blood than Aldric had seen vintages.

“It is a day of hell,” Aldric replied, without looking up. He poked the ditch with his boot. “Water travels downhill, Gerold. It is the only truth the world respects. I have drawn a line for it to follow. This is not a miracle. It is a ditch.”

The ditch in question was not, of course, his idea. Three weeks prior, Charlemagne had summoned him to the palace with a summons that was less an invitation than a lasso. The Emperor had heard—through the inevitable network of gossiping monks and anxious courtiers—that the lord of the Vosges had once, in a fit of boredom, devised a system of sluices and terraces that had tripled his vineyard’s yield while halving the labour of his serfs. The Emperor, who was building a palace in a swamp and needed the swamp to go elsewhere, had commanded Aldric to “solve the matter of the water.”

Aldric had tried, briefly and desperately, to feign incompetence. He had drawn a map so deliberately absurd that a child would have laughed. Charlemagne had examined it for a long moment, his great grey-flecked beard trembling, and then had said, “You will begin tomorrow, and you will do it properly, or I will have your vineyards turned into a training ground for cavalry.”

The vineyards, of course, were the only thing that mattered. They had been in his family for three generations, clinging to the sun-warmed slopes above the Moselle, and they produced a wine so fine that even the Pope had requested a cask. Aldric would have gladly surrendered his title, his sword, his very name, before he surrendered those vines.

So he drew a proper map. A brilliant map. A map that solved the drainage of Aachen with such elegant economy—a series of shallow channels, a clever redirection of the stream, a system of settling pools that would turn a bog into a garden—that the Emperor had clapped him on the shoulder with a blow that nearly broke his collarbone.

“You see, Gerold,” Aldric said, now, staring at the shallow water that was already beginning to move along his channel, sluggish but obedient. “I have solved the problem. The water will go where I have told it to go. In three days, this courtyard will be dry. The Emperor will be pleased. And then, by God’s grace, he will let me go home.”

Gerold grunted. “The Emperor has not yet let you go home in four years, my lord.”

Aldric winced. Four years. Four years since the council of 788, when he had been summoned to Aachen to settle a dispute between two abbots over a relic that had turned out to be a sheep’s bone. He had settled it in a single afternoon by pointing out that neither abbot had any proof of the bone’s provenance, and suggesting they share the relic on alternating feast days. The compromise had been so reasonable, so elegantly balanced, that Charlemagne had decided he must be a man of rare wisdom.

“The Emperor mistakes competence for ambition,” Aldric said, “and I have been paying for his error ever since.”

A shout rang out from the eastern gate. Aldric turned, squinting through the rain, and saw a horseman splashing through the mud—a courier, his horse lathered, his face white beneath the grime of the road.

“Lord Aldric!” the courier cried. “A message from the Emperor! Urgent! The Saxons have crossed the Lippe!”

Aldric’s stomach dropped. He had been to the Saxon marches. He had seen what the Saxons did to the villages they crossed. He had seen the burned churches, the mutilated bodies, the children who no longer spoke. He had no taste for war, but he had no taste for massacre either.

“The Emperor is at Paderborn,” the courier continued, sliding from his horse. “He commands you to join him with all haste. He says—he says you are to bring your maps.”

“My maps?” Aldric blinked. “What maps? I have maps of vineyards. I have a map of a drainage ditch. I have no maps of war.”

The courier shook his head. “The Emperor says you will know the maps he means, my lord. He says you are to bring the maps of the Lippe crossing, the ones you drew when you were planning your retirement.”

Aldric felt the blood drain from his face. He had drawn those maps, yes—three years ago, in a moment of idle fancy, when he had been planning a quiet journey to the eastern frontier to visit a cousin who brewed a particularly fine ale. He had sketched the fords, the marshland, the places where a small army might cross without being detected. He had rolled them up and hidden them in his baggage, intending to use them for a hunting trip.

He had forgotten them entirely.

“God’s teeth,” he whispered.

Gerold looked at him with something between exasperation and awe. “You planned a retirement, and you planned an invasion route, and you forgot you had done it?”

“I planned a hunting trip,” Aldric said, weakly. “It was a very good hunting trip.”

The courier was waiting, dripping, expectant. Aldric stared at the ditch, at the water that was now flowing exactly where he had told it to flow, and felt the trap closing around him. He had solved the swamp. He had solved the relic. He had solved the Avars, who had sent an embassy to Aachen the previous year, and Aldric, desperate to avoid a banquet, had written a treaty proposal so flattering to the Khagan that the Avars had agreed to a truce on the spot. Charlemagne had been delighted. Aldric had been horrified.

Every act of idleness, every clever shortcut, every half-finished scheme designed to buy him a moment of peace—each one had been seized by the Emperor and turned into a tool of state.

“Gerold,” Aldric said, slowly, “I am going to die in this palace. I am going to die of overwork, or of the Emperor’s enthusiasm, or of my own cursed cleverness.”

Gerold, who had seen his family butchered by Charlemagne’s armies and had chosen service over vengeance, looked at his master with a flicker of dark humour. “You will die, my lord. We all will. The question is whether you will die in your vineyard, or in a mud-filled ditch in a foreign land.”

Aldric sighed. He rolled up his drainage map, tucked it into his satchel, and turned toward the stables.

“Fetch the horses,” he said. “It seems I am going to war with a hunting map.”

As they mounted in the rain, a messenger from the palace arrived with a second letter, sealed with the Emperor’s own ring. Aldric broke the seal, read the few lines, and went very still.

“My lord?” Gerold asked.

Aldric did not answer for a long moment. The rain fell. The horses stamped. The ditch continued to carry its water, obedient and silent.

“The Emperor,” Aldric said at last, “has commanded that I bring the maps to Paderborn. And he has also commanded that I bring my best wine.”

Gerold frowned. “Wine, my lord?”

Aldric looked up at the grey sky, and a grim smile touched his lips. “It seems, Gerold, that I am not merely going to war. I am going to a coronation.”

The letter in his hand bore a date that made no sense—unless, he thought, the Emperor had already decided that he would not be content with the crown of the Franks. And if Charlemagne wanted a new crown, and he wanted Aldric’s wine, and he wanted Aldric’s maps—

“God help me,” Aldric whispered. “He is going to make me plan a miracle.”