by Judith Tarr
“It was only a passing faintness.”
“Go to bed, I said!”
It was the same tone which she used with a recalcitrant child. She saw a spark of anger in his eyes—after all, she had sent for him and made use of him and thanked him not at all—and with it a glint that might have been amusement, but he obeyed her meekly enough.
He had left his wine almost untouched. She raised the cup, stared at it for a long moment, and drained it to the dregs.
But the strong vintage of Cos had no power tonight to dull her wits or to lull her body to sleep. After a wakeful while she left Bardas in Katya’s care and went where her feet led her.
o0o
The garden had succumbed to frost some time since; the waxing moon lent a cold beauty to its ruins. Sophia walked through the brittle grass among flower beds covered thickly with leaves until spring. Although the air was cold, the wine warmed her.
A flicker of light, a murmur of voices, drew her to the far corner. The moon glinted on Alf’s pale head as he sat cross-legged on the ground, a white dove nestling in his hands. Even as Sophia paused, shrinking back instinctively into the shadows, he said in a soft clear voice, “You know I can’t do that.”
The dove stirred, ruffling its feathers.
“I’ve tried,” he said. “I can’t. I do everything just as you’ve told me; and when the change begins, when nothing inside me is solid or stable, terror drives me back into myself.”
The white bird spread its wings. His hands were empty; a hound stood before him, glowing white as if its coat had trapped the moon. Its ears were the color of blood.
Something moved in Alf’s shadow. A small figure danced about the beast, and the beast leaped with it, licking its laughing face.
Alf’s grave expression softened. “Yes; that’s my favorite shape, too.” His hands gathered light, fingers flying; he wrapped Nikephoros in shimmering strands like jewels, or like chains.
Sophia sprang forward in fear, in consuming anger. She snatched up her son, hardly aware that the cords of light had thinned and fallen away, or that the witch-hound had fallen back, leaving her face to face with the creature she had begun to love as a kinsman.
“Sorcerer!” she hissed at him.
He flinched as if she had struck him, but said no word. He looked very young, and wounded to the heart.
He had ensnared them all and corrupted her son. Nikki struggled wildly in her arms, not knowing her at all, aware only that she had taken him away from his delight.
“You’re hurting him,” Alf said softly.
She tightened her grip. “Better I than you. How long have you had your spell on him? How long before you make him one of you?”
“Since we met,” he answered, “and never. No human can become what I am.”
Surely his candor was a trap. Nikki had quieted, chest heaving, each breath catching in a sob. She held him more lightly and turned him to face her. A sharp pain wrung from her a cry; he broke free.
His teeth had drawn blood. She pressed a corner of her shawl to the wound and stood still, watching without comprehension.
Alf had not drawn the child in or otherwise sealed his victory. Nikki clung to him with frantic strength; gently but firmly he pried the clutching hands away and set Nikki on his feet.
For a moment his hands rested on Nikki’s shoulders. They stiffened, then sagged. Nikki turned slowly, drew his mother’s arm down, kissed the place where he had bitten her. His face was wet with tears.
She kissed them away. His arms locked around her waist. But only for a moment. He stood back, head up, and turned his face from her to Alf and back again. His pleading was clear to read.
She hardened her heart. “Who is your master, witch-man? The Lord of Lies?”
“No,” he said, the flat word, no more.
“Why? Why did you turn out to be like this? We took you in. We trusted you. We loved you. Why didn’t you—oh God, why didn’t you keep me from seeing this?”
He touched her hand. She recoiled. But he pursued, rising, towering over her. His fingers closed about her wrist; he turned her arm, uncovering the wound. It had bled very little, but it ached fiercely.
He brushed her skin with a fingertip, rousing a deep shudder, yet the touch was warm. The pain ebbed away; the marks faded like smoke in the sun.
He let her go. She drew back step by step until she was well out of reach. “Why?” she cried to him.
“I wanted you to know from the first. You wouldn’t listen. The doctor knew in Chalcedon. You wouldn’t heed him. And I was weak enough to let you be. Tonight... Bardas is dying, Sophia. Within a year he will die, nor can any power of mine do more than slow his dying. And before he slept he wanted me to tend you as a grown son would when he should be gone. Could I let either of you depend upon a lie?”
Her voice caught in her throat. She forced it out. “Does—does he—”
“He knows.”
“But when—”
“Before I made him sleep. He said he always knew I wasn’t like anyone else. He didn’t want you to know. You are a jewel among women, he said, but after all you are a woman.”
“But he didn’t say any of that!”
“He thought it.”
There was a silence. Sophia gathered her scattered wits into what order she might. Alf stood unmoving. The moon had caught his eyes and struck fire in them.
She rubbed her arm where the pain had been, slowly, eyes fixed upon him. “What would happen,” she asked in a steady voice, “if I called a priest?”
“He would be extremely annoyed to be roused so late.”
She strangled laughter that was half hysteria. “And for nothing, too. I can’t hate you, Alfred. I may be endangering everyone who’s dear to me, but I simply can’t.”
“I’ll go away,” he said. “I should have done it at the first.”
Sophia wanted to hit him. She seized his hand instead, too quickly for either of them to shrink away, and held it fast. “Don’t be ridiculous. You have a place here. There’s no point in running away from it.”
“I’m corrupting your children.”
“You’re keeping my husband alive.”
He bowed his head. His face was in shadow, the lids lowered over the strangeness of his eyes. He was a legend, a tale of wonder and of terror. Yet she realized that she felt no fear of him at all. His hand was warm in hers, made of flesh like her own; she had seen him ill and she had seen him well, healing where men had destroyed.
“No,” he said, “don’t judge me now. It’s only the wine and your anxiety for Bardas, and guilt that you spoke to me as you did, though you had the right.”
“I had no right!” she countered sharply. “I forgot everything I’d ever seen of you. I spoke to wound you who’d already worn yourself to a rag for Bardas and for me; and I thought things of you that no man would ever forgive. And you never moved to defend yourself. Whatever you are, Alfred of Saint Ruan’s, you’re far closer to Heaven than to Hell.”
“You’ve seen what I can do.”
“Would you harm me or any of us?”
“No.” He answered at once, without doubt, though the rest was soft, almost hesitant. “I couldn’t. It would hurt me too much.”
She embraced him tightly. “You’re safe now,” she said. “No more fears and no more secrets. There’s only one thing.”
He tensed.
Sophia drew his head down, the better to see his face. “Do you always know what everyone’s thinking?”
His eyes widened in dismay and in understanding. “Oh, no! Only when there’s need, or when the other wishes it; or when there’s no help for it.”
She let him go, oddly comforted. “Of course,” she said. “There would be laws and courtesies. And you are a philosopher?”
“Of sorts.”
“You’re not as young as you look, are you?”
“No,” he answered, “I am not.”
“Sometimes it shows.” She touched him again, a brief caress.
“Thank you, Alfred.”
“For what?”
“For everything. Even For telling me. I still trust you with my children.”
He bowed low, unable for once to speak.
15.
“Aristotle,” said Thea, “was a mere maker of lists. Plato was a philosopher.”
“Plato lacked a system.” Alf closed his book, rose and stretched.
Thea watched him from her corner of the window niche. “A philosopher has to have a system?”
“If he wants to capture the fancy of the schoolmasters.”
“And you?”
“I prefer Plato.” He sat down again, close but not touching, and took up his book. “I’m illogical, old-fashioned, and very probably a heretic.”
“Very probably,” she agreed. “I’m tired of the Categories. Where’s the book you found in Master Dionysios’ library?”
“The Plato? In my room. Shall I fetch it?”
“Let me.” She set it in his lap, snatched out of air. Their hands touched; his withdrew quickly. He opened the book more quickly still.
His eyes ran over the words, but his mind reflected Thea’s face. He stole a glance at her. She sat with knees drawn up, head cocked to one side, waiting. A difficult pupil, she; lethally quick-witted and well aware of it, acknowledging him her master but allowing him not an instant’s rest upon his laurels.
She would catch him now if he did not bring his mind to order. But it would not shape itself as he willed it. He watched his hand stretch out to trace the curve of her cheek.
She smiled with the familiar touch of mockery. “Was that in your book?”
“Dreams,” he said, “are shadows of the life we live, and life a shadow of the Reality.”
“Have your dreams been strange of late?”
“My body is seventeen years old. My mind in sleep follows it and it alone. What are six decades of philosophy in the face of that?”
“What use is philosophy at all? Except to keep dry old men busy and to put young ones to sleep, where they dream of love and wake to foolish shame.”
“My teaching bores you then? Do you want to end it?” He managed to sound both eager and regretful.
She laughed and weighed their two books in her hands, Plato and Aristotle. “Bored? I? How could I be? You’re the best of teachers, and you know it. But I’m a poor philosopher. All those wordy old men with their heads in the clouds…even Socrates, who knew a thing or two of the world, what was he doing but escaping his termagant of a wife and finding excuses for his poverty?”
“There’s more to the world than what we see.”
“Who should know that better than I? And I like to give my mind a bit of exercise. But I can’t look at all those sober speculations in the proper light. If you and I are only shadows, or faulty conglomerations of the four elements, or a dance of atoms in the void, why is life so sweet?”
“To you perhaps it is.”
“And to you it isn’t? Humans have trapped you, little Brother. They live a little while, bound in flesh that must decay; some do the world a bit of good, but most, like angry children, destroy as much of it as they can before they’re snatched away. Or they make up stories about the foulness of flesh to convince themselves that they don’t want to stay in it. They forget how to live, and say that God, or the gods, or the Demiurge, or whatever power you will, set them here to test them and prove them worthy of an afterlife. Or else, and worst of all, they deny that there is any meaning in anything, and give themselves up to despair.”
“Would you rather that no one thought on his fate at all?”
“Too much of anything is dangerous. Look at you. The monks made you in their own image, and taught you to shrink from the world. Maybe they were made for Heaven, but you weren’t.”
“Then I must have been made for Hell.”
She glared at him. “Don’t talk like a fool. You were made for earth, which stands precisely between. And which means that you can reach for both. Heaven if you live as you were meant to live, in full realization of what you are. And Hell if you deny any part of yourself.”
“If I turn my power loose, I can destroy the world.”
“That’s arrogance, and a denial of your conscience. We are gifted with one, you know. Or cursed, if you prefer.”
“We, you say. What are we? Changelings, say people in Anglia. But all the legends tell of human children stolen and monsters set in their places, troll-brats or mindless images that shrivel away with the dawn. Not elf-children of the true blood.”
“Who’s to say what real elf-children are like? Maybe we are monsters, too hideous or too incomplete to be endured, or else miserable hybrids whom none of our lofty kin would acknowledge. Though I’ve talked with beings of the otherworld, ghosts, and once a demon; and I’ve heard tell of one of us who met a Power under a hollow hill. None of them could or would tell us what we are. Maybe we really are changelings. Maybe we’re God’s joke on humankind. Maybe we don’t exist at all. Who knows? There are only a few of us that I know of, and those few have all gone to Rhiyana or known its King.”
“Gwydion, for all his wisdom, knows no more than you or I.”
“Yet you asked me, woman that I am, and anything but royal. I’m flattered.”
“I was shouting in the dark.”
“And avoiding the main issue as usual. Your body isn’t as easy to distract as your mind is. When are you going to listen to it?”
“When it stops bidding me to sin.”
“Is love a sin?”
“Love, no. This is lust.”
“Can you be so sure of that?”
That was her essence: to shake the foundations of his world. He unclenched his fists, took the books from her, rose. “I can’t separate the two when I think of you, but I will do it. Then we shall see.”
“Then you shall no longer have me to trouble you.”
She spoke so quietly and so calmly that she frightened him. He moved by instinct, closer to her; standing over her, looking down into her face. The books weighed him down; he willed them away and set his hands upon her shoulders. So thin she was, all brittle bones like a bird. She had had no more sleep or food or peace of mind than he had.
Without conscious thought, he bent and kissed her. She responded with more warmth than he had looked for or dared to hope.
“Yes, damn you,” she said angrily, “I love you, God help me. Love you, lust for you, and snatch with shameful eagerness at any crumb you deign to drop in front of me.”
He stroked the smooth softness of her hair. She closed her eyes and shivered. “Damn you,” she whispered. “Oh, damn you.”
He knelt face to face with her and took her cold hands. “Marry me, Thea,” he said.
Her eyes opened wide. He met them, baring his mind to her, all defenseless. I mean it, he said. I want it. Marry me.
Her eyes, then her hand, freed from his, explored his face. Her fingers tangled in his hair. “I love you,” she said.
He waited, heart hammering, unable to breathe.
“I love you,” she repeated, speaking carefully, “but I don’t want to marry you.”
His heart stopped. All the blood drained from his face.
She played with his hair, smoothing it, stroking it. “You want me almost as badly as I want you. But you’re afraid of the sin. Marriage, you think, will take away both the sin and the fear. You don’t see yet that words mean nothing; that love, not a priest’s mumbling, is the sacrament.”
“I do see it,” he said in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.
“Only with your eyes. In your mind, Alfred of Saint Ruan’s, you’re still in your cloister, though the Pope has given you a writ that says the opposite. And I won’t marry a monk.”
For a long while he knelt there under her hand. Little by little his heart went cold. She saw it; he watched the dismay grow in her eyes. But she said, “I would be your lover if you were the Lord Pope. Your wife I cannot and will not be.”
He rose
slowly. He understood now why she had flown from him in Petreia. But her anger had been fiery hot. His was ice-cold. “I beg your pardon, my lady,” he said. “I have offended you. I shall not repeat my error.” He bowed with careful correctness and began to turn away.
“Alf!” she cried.
He turned back. She faced him, and he saw a stranger, a woman beautiful in her anger, who after all meant nothing to him.
Her own passion froze; her head came up, her chin set. “No,” she said, “do not offend me again.”
Once more he bowed. This time she did not try to prevent his leaving.
16.
This was going to be a bad day, Sophia thought. The children had been quarreling since they woke; the cook was in bed with a fever and breakfast had been all but inedible; and Bardas had risen from a sleepless night, dressed, and announced that he was going out and be damned to them all. Even the sky wept, a grey cold rain that would turn to sleet by nightfall.
She paused in the passage between the kitchen and her workroom and rubbed her aching eyes. “God,” she prayed under her breath, “give me patience, or at least a decent night’s sleep.”
Swift light footsteps brought her erect. Alf descended the stair from his room, fastening his cloak as he moved. He slowed when he saw her; his eyes warmed.
The world seemed a little lighter for his presence. Sophia put on a smile for him and said, “Good morning. I didn’t see you at breakfast.”
“I ate in the nursery with Nikki.” He drew up his hood and settled a hat over it. All his face receded into shadow save for the uncanny ember-flare of his eyes. Yet even that comforted her, in its own fashion.
He touched her cheek, the merest brush of a fingertip. “Bardas won’t harm himself,” he said gently.
“In this weather?”
Alf smiled, a white flash in the depths of his hood. “He’ll be well. I’ve seen to that. And he’s better off as he is, working and making himself useful, than fretting in his bed.”
Her answering smile was faint but genuine. It faded as she sensed a change in him like a sudden, freezing wind. Thea stood at the end of the passage, stiff and still. Alf inclined his head to her politely, as to a stranger; bowed to Sophia, murmuring a word or two of farewell; and took his leave.
