“So we are brought around again to our purpose here today. I have rested enough, Lord Helmut. Shall we go on?”
He nodded assent. His son handed him the reins to his horse and Rosvita took up her walking staff. She had been offered a donkey to ride, but she preferred to approach a hermit of such holy reputation in the most humble manner possible, as St. Thecla was said to have approached the blessed Daisan when first she came to him begging to become his disciple.
On they went. In fact, she had put off the errand for several days, hoping Henry would change his mind and decide not to send her. But he had not changed his mind. Sympathy for Father Bardo’s plight had forced her hand: As long as the king’s progress remained at Hersford Monastery, the abbot had to feed them. Hersford was prosperous but not rich enough to host the king’s entourage for longer than five or six days.
The broad dirt path soon became a thin weedy track that cut through undergrowth and in and out of stands of trees. Their party had to walk single file and the horses were much bothered by vegetation slapping into them. Rosvita, at the fore, apologized more than once for getting and letting a branch spring back directly into the head of Villam’s son, but Berthold never complained. It was a still day, a little muggy, suggesting a hot summer to come.
The crown of the hill was not, as she had supposed, the same thick forest through which they had ascended. The path broke suddenly into sunlight and they emerged onto a level field strewn with great fallen stones and the scattered saplings and bushy undergrowth that marked this as a place once inhabited by people but now abandoned, being slowly overtaken by the forest beyond. Four mounds overgrown with lush grass and wild-flowers rose in the great clearing.
“I never knew the old Dariyans built on hills as high as this,” said Villam, obviously surprised to find ruins here.
Rosvita ventured farther into the clearing. She bumped up against a stone hidden by grass. It was a great block of stone, gray and weathered, with pictures or words carved into it, so worn away by weather, years, and the lichen grown into its curves and grooves that she could not make out what the long-dead builders had chiseled into the stone. She followed the shape of the monolith with her hands, tearing grass away. The block of stone was huge, twice her height though it now lay full length on the ground. At its base she saw the deep hole where it had been sunk into the ground. Now the sinkhole sprouted a thick tangle of nettles.
“This is not a Dariyan ruin, I think,” she said when Villam and his son came up beside her. “See. These inscriptions or images here are much worn, and usually we can read those left by the Dariyan peoples. Also, all of the Dariyan forts I have seen were built to square lines. Look.”
She turned to survey the clearing. From here the four mounds stood equidistant and at equal angles to the position of the base of the great stone block. The forest surrounded them, tall trees cutting off any view they might have of the lands below.
“It looks as if the other stones are laid in a circle around this one. And all of them contained by the earth mounds. This is not Dariyan work.”
“Then whose might it be?” asked Villam. He was still puffing. “Giants must have carried this stone up here. Horses could not have dragged it, not up so steep and high a height as this.”
“And with the trees so high,” added Berthold, who was clearly intrigued by these ruins, “this serves no purpose as a fort. We can’t see anything of the land around us.”
Rosvita studied the mounds and the tree line. “I wonder.” She used her walking stick to beat the undergrowth aside and made her way across the clearing to one of the mounds. Berthold followed her while Villam remained behind, still catching his breath. The men-at-arms had taken the horses aside to graze. As she walked and became more aware of the old stones around her, Rosvita felt suddenly that the men-at-arms might simply be reluctant to enter the old fallen ring of stones.
Since that certainly was what this was. A giant’s ring, some called them; elf crowns, said others. Some said they were the teeth of dragons who had fallen asleep and turned to stone when sunlight struck them. Others said that even before the Aoi, the Lost Ones, had abandoned Dariya under the onslaught of Bwrmen and their human allies from the east, there were other creatures who roamed and built here: giants, or the half-human spawn of dragons, or the descendents of angels. These creatures were said to possess a strength and knowledge now lost to humankind, just as the collapse of the Dariyan Empire some four hundred years ago had left the humans who survived that calamity with but a fraction of the knowledge and wisdom that had grown and flourished in the great union of elves and men known as the old Dariyan Empire.