The Warlock Heretical

by Christopher Stasheff

  "Aye, and thus we may keep our heads on our—" Ghibelli froze at the thought. "Why, what a craven knave have I become, that I would value my life above mine honor!" He spun to D'Auguste. "Thou hast spoken well and wily, my lord, to tempt me from loyalty to my sire and class! Yet I have seen thee for what thou art, an equivocator and temporizer who doth leap to wherever the main chance doth fall! Get thee behind me, Satan!"

  "I have spoken words of sound policy only," D'Auguste said quietly.

  "Words of expedience, which are words of treason! This is truly why thou wilt declare for Tuan Loguire, is it not?" And D'Auguste said, "No."

  "Now how is this?" The Archbishop whirled, stabbing out an accusing forefinger. "Thou hadst told me our brothers could move the folk to cry against the King, yet now the King's warlocks do counter each last move that ours do make, and doth even turn them against our monks!"

  He stood with his back to the windows of the solar, sunlight streaming down behind him, surrounding him with a glow that hid his face in shadow. But Brother Alfonso didn't seem to be impressed; in fact, he had to hold his face carefully immobile to keep the contempt from showing, and modulated his tone to conciliation. " 'Tis but the sensible move in the game, milord, and we have but to counter it."

  "What, to counter a counter? Thou dost speak in riddles, Brother Alfonso! How may we do so?"

  "By turning their own thrust against them, milord. They do seek to raise the folk against us clergy—and we may raise them far more easily, 'gainst the witchfolk!"

  The Archbishop lifted his head, a wary look coming into his eyes.

  "If a great outcry 'gainst the witches rose," Brother Alfonso went on, "the King would scarcely dare to use them, for fear of the mob."

  "He would be wise," the Archbishop said, his tone grim. "The mob might quite easily turn against the witches in truth. We might see folk once more burned at the stake, or buried with spikes of wood through their breasts."

  Brother Alfonso shrugged. "Such are the hazards."

  "Aye, and now, thanks to thy chowderheaded counsel, such a hue and cry could turn 'gainst us of the Order! Nay, the mob might even rise against the monastery!"

  "I think not, milord." Brother Alfonso's smile soured. "There is a way to safely advance such a policy. We may show 'tis not witchfolk who are evil, but the King's witches only."

  The Archbishop scowled. "And how shalt thou do thus?"

  "Why, by interdicting only their leaders." Brother Alfonso smiled again, with malice. "Thou mayest simply condemn the High Warlock and his wife as heretics."

  "Have you any particular reason for riding to Moltrane Village, Rod?"

  It was unusual to have your mode of transportation question your motivation for using it, but Rod always made an exception for Fess. So did the horse, for him.

  "Officially, to get a salami to chop up for dinner," Rod answered. "At least, that's what I told Gwen."

  "Did she wish to know why you did not go to an inn in Runnymede? It is almost as near."

  "She didn't, which means she understands that I need to get away from it all for a while."

  "It will scarcely take us an hour to go to Moltrane and back. Rod, even at my slowest pace."

  "That's long enough—and frankly, I couldn't justify staying away much longer than that. Just between you and me, Fess, I think this conflict is making Gwen a lot more nervous than any fight we've ever been in before."

  "Because of her religious convictions, you mean?"

  "Yeah, I think that's why. I didn't even know she had any."

  "No doubt she hid them well, Rod, out of consideration for your feelings."

  Rod frowned, glaring at the back of the horse's head. "What do you mean by that?"

  "She understands that you have an aversion to the outward show of religion, Rod, to its rituals and sacramentals, and therefore restrains her own desire for them."

  Rod stared.

  "Rod?"

  "Yeah, I'm still here. Fess, I don't have an aversion to liturgy—I just don't like religion!"

  "You were reared a Catholic, Rod, and when the Faith takes hold of you as a child, it never truly lets go."

  "Yeah, early brainwashing." Rod shuddered. "Well, I will admit I have a tendency to play it safe when I think of the afterlife."

  "More than that, Rod—underneath your show of agnosticism, you are a very religious man."

  "What do you mean? I'm not even sure who Christ was!"

  "That does not hinder your belief in Him."

  Rod frowned. "I could take offense at that, you know."

  "True, but you know that I do not intend any such offense— it is outside my program. Your programming, however, is a product of the Church."

  "Is that why I all but hated it for a while?"

  "Perhaps, but that only illustrates my point. You may have resented religion, Rod, and you may have rejected it—but you have never been indifferent to it."

  Fortunately at that point, they heard the tolling of a nearby chapel bell.

  Rod stopped. "That's the Moltrane chime. What's the matter? Flood? Fire?"

  Fess lifted his head. "My sensors do not detect any byproducts of combustion, Rod, so it cannot be fire. And we have not had rain for two weeks."

  "So it has to be foes. Gallop, Fess! They might need our help!"

  But the scene on Moltrane Common was peaceful enough. The peasants crowded around the church steps, with a few late plowmen still running up. Rod reined in as he came even with the cottages, frowning. "All that just for this? What is he, the monk who cried wolf?"

  "He is reading aloud, Rod. Presumably it is a communication of great importance."

  "I'm leery of communications from the Church, these days." Rod twisted the stone in his ring and pointed it at the priest. The stone was a well-disguised microphone, extremely directional, and the elaborate setting hid an amplifier circuit and miniature transmitter, feeding the signal into the earphone implanted behind Rod's ear. "Boost your amplification, Fess— I want you to hear this, too."

  "'… a traitor to Holy Mother the Church,'" the priest was reading, " 'and an infidel and unbeliever. He doth practice his Art in contravention of God's will and the direction of the Church of Gramarye. Therefore do we pronounce the heretics Rod Gallowglass, who doth style himself Lord High Warlock, and his wife Gwendylon, to be no longer in communication with the Church of Gramarye, and as excommunicate, banned from all services and Sacraments, and no longer within our protection against the entrapment of the Devil. Yours in Christ, John Widdecombe, Archbishop of Gramarye.'"

  The priest rolled up the parchment with trembling hands, and the peasants burst into furious babbling.

  All Rod could say was, "I'm going to have to tell Gwen, aren't I?"

  "You must, Rod. Personally. And, I hope, before anyone else can bring her that news."

  "Yes." Rod gazed out at the crowd, frowning. "I hate letting her down at a moment like this, but I don't think I should stop to pick up that sausage."

  "I am damned! I am bound to eternal hellfire!"

  "No you're not, darling." Rod knelt beside Gwen, pleading. "It's just a bunch of words."

  "Words of an Archbishop! No! Do not touch me! Tis thou hast brought me to this, thou and thy pride, that would not allow thee to bow to the man of God! No!"

  "But I haven't changed what I believe!"

  "Yet thou art excommunicated! And I with thee!" She spun about, her face in her hands.' "Excommunicated! Nevermore to have the Sacraments! Nevermore to receive God's grace! Oh, thou hast woefully wronged me now and again, Rod Gallow-glass, yet never so badly as thisl"

  "But it wasn't me who did it, it was—"

  " 'Twas done to theel And I am under its ban for being thy wife! Though aye, I must own I have done grievous wrong to the Church also, in giving aid and support to Their Majesties 'gainst the Archbishop! Oh, what a vile sinner am I!"

  "You're a heroinel" Rod exploded. "Time and again you've been the only wall between the poor, good people and
the greedy, selfish men who wanted to grind them into the dirt!"

  "I cannot be good if the priests so execrate me!"

  "But you didn't go up against the Church—you just followed where I led!"

  "Aye, and shamed am I to have done so! 'Tis my soul, mine, and 'twas for me to decide whether to take God's part or thine! How could I have been so blind as not to see thou didst stray into Satan's net!"

  "It's the Archbishop who's going to the Devil!" Rod howled. "You know that! You've watched him move, step by step, away from the Pope and toward the sins he himself preaches against!"

  Gwen stood transfixed, pale as a shroud, wordless, staring at him.

  He didn't know whether she was going to break or rally, but he had to try something. "You are as good as any human being can be! You are patient, gentle, giving, and loving! You have never faltered for an instant in your faith in God's goodness or my redeemability! Never in any way, as long as I've known you, have you done anything the Church preaches against!"

  "I have taken arms," Gwen whispered. "I have fought in wrath, I have slain men!"

  "But only in defense of the people they were trying to kill! Only when you were caught between Commandments! Oh, sure, you've lost your temper now and then—but only a saint could have kept it, with our four little imps! And the saints wouldn't have dared come anywhere near them!"

  Gwen stared at him in a silence that stretched on for so long Rod was afraid she would break, but he didn't dare speak another word. He'd said all that he could; anything more might push her away from him forever.

  Then her shoulders began to shake.

  Tears? he thought, in a panic. Or laughter?

  Her mouth curved, and she began to giggle.

  Rod almost caved in.

  The giggle swelled into laughter and she collapsed into a chair, sprawling helplessly as her howls of glee shook the house. Rod found himself laughing, too, and couldn't help wondering why his cheeks were wet. He staggered over and collapsed next to her, kneeling as he fell, arms outstretched, and she fell into them, rocking back and forth with him in a gale of mirth.

  Finally they quieted, and Gwen wiped her eyes as she gasped, "Aye, 'tis foolish, is't not? When I have seen this very priest stray into sin, and do yet hearken to his words?"

  "He excommunicated himself," Rod pointed out, "when he separated from Rome. He's the one who opened up the heresy business."

  " 'Tis true." Gwen nodded. "Rome would call him an heretic, would it not?"

  "The Pope and every soul in the College of Cardinals," Rod assured her. "So what are you, if you're heretical to a heretic?"

  "One of the faithful, to be sure." The amusement was fading into something grim. "We are still of the Roman Church, my lord, are we not?"

  "Sure," Rod said quickly. "We haven't repudiated it."

  "And this was a most wily snare of Satan's, that did both tempt and afright me into deserting the True Church." Gwen's tone hardened. "Had it not been for thee, my lord, I would have fallen into his net." •

  "Oh, no, I wouldn't say I deserve credit—"

  "Thou never dost," she cut him off. "Thou hast humility, among thine other virtues; how could I have thought thee a sinner?"

  "Uh…"

  "Be still," she commanded. "I will number thy virtues, sin that thou wilt not. Yet, my lord…" She turned to him, frowning, puzzled. "How may we say which is right, when two churches each say it is sole and true? And how can we know which is right—the one that doth say we are damned, or the one that doth say we are not?"

  "It's really up to God, isn't it?" Rod said gently.

  "Aye, certes, yet how are we to know?"

  "Same way the churchmen do—try to listen to Him. And just in case you don't hear anything, check your conscience. At the bottom of your heart, do you honestly think you've done anything really sinful?"

  Gwen was still, and Rod held his breath.

  "In my youth, mayhap," she said finally, "though I think our children have given me ample opportunity to atone."

  Rod heaved a sigh of .relief. "So it's the Archbishop and his henchmen who're the sinners, not us."

  "Aye, 'tis he doth sin, and most grievously, in bringing this confusion of the soul upon us, by separating from Rome." Then her eyes widened. "Did I truly say that?"

  "Don't worry about it," Rod soothed.

  "I will not," she said, with decision. "And now, my lord, by our Archbishop's accounting, I am truly an heretic."

  "Only on Gramarye, dear," Rod assured her, "and only in five counties."

  "I couldn't believe she'd taken such a medieval attitude." Rod shook his head, flabbergasted.

  "Wherefore not, Rod? She is, after all, a medieval woman."

  "Yeah." Rod frowned. "I keep forgetting that, just because she's so intelligent and responsible, and has managed to learn everything I've learned, and does just as much on the national level as I do, and—"

  Fess emitted a rumbling noise, the robot's equivalent of clearing his throat.

  "Oh! Yes, I was kind of running on there, wasn't I?" Rod pursed his lips. "At least it's understandable, how I forget."

  "Understandable, yes. But she was raised in a medieval society, Rod, and early attitudes are fundamental; they are always there, at the bottom of the personality."

  "Yes." Rod nodded. "The wonder is not that she went berserk for a few minutes, but that she managed to come back."

  The Archbishop was in his scriptorium, appointing bishops. He smiled as he wrote, dipping his pen in the inkwell with zest and signing his name with a flourish.

  "… art hereby created Bishop of Tudor, to be confirmed by the laying on of hands when tide and times allow, at our abbey here in the House of St. Vidicon. Till that time doth come, ward thy flock well, and guide them in the true way of our Church. John Widdecombe, Archbishop of Gramarye."

  "Theodore Obrise, Bishop of Stuart," he said as he sprinkled sand over the ink.

  Brother Alfonso wrote Father Obrise's name carefully on the roster of bishops.

  The Archbishop shook the sand off the parchment, rolled it, and handed it to a rather pale Brother Anho, who melted sealing wax onto the rolled edge, then held it while the Archbishop pressed his signet ring into the pool. He turned and laid it on the stack for the messenger as the Archbishop turned back to the desk and took a clean sheet of parchment. "Now. Who is chaplain to the Earl Tudor?"

  "Father Gregory McKenzie," Brother Alfonso replied.

  "To the Reverend Gregory McKenzie," the Archbishop wrote, "in the name of the Lord, greetings. Knowing thee to be steadfast in the Faith…"

  Father McKenzie unrolled the parchment with a frown. "What hath His Grace to tell me, Brother Lionel, that may not be said by word of mouth?"

  The messenger put down his mug and wiped foam from his moustache. "I know not, Father; I but bear the scroll."

  '"To the Reverend Gregory McKenzie,'" the priest read; but as he went on, his eyes widened. When he finished, he looked up, eyes glowing, lips trembling as he tried to confine them to only a small smile. "I thank thee for this good news, Brother. Wilt thou bear messages for me, to all the parish priests in Tudor?"

  "Father Obrise doth wish speech with thee, milord."

  "The priest?" Earl Stuart ran his hand over the withers of his new chestnut stallion, frowning. "What doth he wish?"

  "He will not say, milord, yet he is pale as a January hillside."

  Stuart lifted his head, then turned slowly away from the stallion. "Bid him come." He went out of the paddock, a footman closing the gate behind him, and stood, feet apart, arms akimbo, as the priest came up. "God save thee, Father."

  "And thee, my lord." The old man's lips were pressed tight, and his hand trembled as he held out the parchment scroll. "I hold here a letter from Milord Archbishop."

  Stuart braced himself. "Read it me."

  The priest unrolled the parchment with a sigh; he knew well that Earl Stuart had never spared the time to learn to read. " 'To the Reverend Axel Obrise, f
rom the Reverend John Widde-combe, by the grace of God Archbishop of Gramarye…"'

  When he had finished, he rolled up the parchment, straightening as much as he could and gazing directly into Earl Stuart's eyes.

  "Well, then," the Earl said, with a taut smile, "thou art my bishop henceforth. Shall I congratulate thee?"

  "Nay," Father Obrise said, "for I cannot accept this appointment."

  The earl lost his smile, and the two men stared at one another in taut silence. Then the earl said, "Wherefore canst thou not?"

  "For that I cannot in all good conscience part from the Church of Rome."

  Earl Stuart stared at him, his eyes two chips of ice. Then he said, "Thou art lately come to this piety."

  " 'Tis my shame." the old priest acknowledged. "I did delay, hoping His Grace would cease his vanity; yet he doth persist. Now I find that I can no longer endure in silence."

  The earl nodded slowly. "And thou canst no longer be chaplain here." He turned to a nearby guardsman. "Escort Father Obrise to our most pleasant dungeon cell."

  The young soldier blanched, but came forward to do as he was bid.

  The altar bell rang, and Earl Tudor knelt for morning mass— but when he looked up, he stared in horror at the apparition before him. It was Father McKenzie as always, but the chaplain was holding a crozier and wearing a bishop's mitre on his head.

  "Dominus Vobiscum," the priest intoned. "Ere we begin the Mass, I shall ask thee to rejoice with me—for, by authority of our good Archbishop, I am elevated to the rank of Bishop of Tudor."

  He held up his hands, but there was no outcry of delight, for Earl Tudor was standing, pale-faced and trembling. "Reverend Father," he grated, "thou canst not be made bishop by Abbot Widdecombe, for he doth lack authority. The Pope hath not named him Archbishop."

  "So I had thought, my lord." The priest turned to the Earl, lifting his head a bit. "Yet I am now persuaded of the Tightness of his cause."

  "Aye, for that he will make thee a bishop! Nay, I shall not have the Church of Gramarye within these precincts! Thou mayest no longer be chaplain here."

  "My lord, 'tis not for thee to—"

  "Sir Willem!" the Earl snapped. "Thou, and a guard of six men, take this overweening friar in all his finery and escort him to the eastern border, where he may cross to the estates of the Due di Medici! He will find greater hospitality there, where the Church of Gramarye doth hold sway!"