Feeling irritable because I was so weak, I said, “Then if she can’t handle a glimpse of a little sin—and six years ago at that, I hope you told her!—then it’s a good thing she won’t be a priest. See if the cook made any crullers this morning.”
As I ate my breakfast, deciding that I would have improved much faster if they had spooned tea into my mouth these last few weeks along with the chicken soup, I had the vague feeling that I had discovered something important shortly before the wolf attacked me. And something Theodora had told me about our daughter was worrisome. I wondered what it was.
IV
I was able to recall enough herbal magic to assist the natural properties of Ascelin’s healing herbs, and within a few days fresh, pink skin was growing on my arms where the wolf had bitten. The Lady Justinia, to my relief, showed no sign of trying to win my love by assisting in nursing me. The bishop telephoned from the cathedral office to tell me how grateful he was that I was alive, his voice and face giving no hint that he had ever been angry with me. He said nothing about Cyrus, and I decided it was most diplomatic not to ask.
Hildegarde came to my chambers to talk to me. I was out of bed now and spent part of each day sitting by the window, enjoying the warm air and leafing through my predecessor’s books. Since I seemed to owe my life to the old magic, I thought I ought to learn a little more. It was startling to find in the margins in several places annotations in Elerius’s small, neat hand.
“It looks to me, Wizard,” said Hildegarde, “as though you and the knights overcame that wolf through raw strength, not wizardry.”
“Not quite,” I said slowly. A lot that had happened in the days before the incident was still confused in my mind, but my memories of the wolf were crystal clear. “He was bigger and faster and stronger than any ordinary wolf, and that was wizardry.” Cyrus’s magic, I thought. Or someone else’s? This was one of the points on which I was still unclear. “Without my own magic, I don’t think the knights would have had a chance.”
“Well, it died just like any beast once they got their swords into it,” said Hildegarde. “And that’s what I wanted to ask you. Why didn’t you take more knights with you?”
“Including you?” I asked good-naturedly. “I took enough to overcome the wolf, I hoped—and it turned out I was right—but no more, because one death this summer, the night watchman’s, was already too many.”
“But you might have been killed yourself,” she said accusingly. “Why should you be able to face death but no one else?”
“Do you think it’s actually good to be killed?” I asked, startled. “Has it been so long since knights in the western kingdoms were involved in wars that horrible pain and raw terror is actually appealing?”
“Well, maybe not,” she said reluctantly. “But it is what knights are trained to face. I think I could be brave in the face of mortal danger. But now you wizards have taken all the danger for yourselves.”
“Of course. That’s because we’re pledged to serve humanity.”
“All right, then, Wizard,” she said, as though she had been carefully constructing an argument and I had just conceded a key point, “are you going to let your daughter face death to save the lives of some knights?”
“Antonia?” I was horrified. “Certainly not!”
“Then what are you doing,” she continued, bending closer, “teaching her magic?”
That was a very good question. But I didn’t have time to consider it. The point that had been nagging me for several days came to me at last. Antonia was staying with her friend Jen while Theodora was here in Yurt. And Jen’s mother let her play with the Dog-Man.
“Antonia is a delightful little girl,” said Hildegarde conversationally. “Celia is just being silly. Because you’re good friends with the bishop, she had somehow convinced herself that you should be almost a priest yourself. I know she won’t be happy as a nun—she’s got the same desire for action as I do. Saying she wanted to be the West’s first woman priest was bad enough, but to go into the cloister! She’s overreacting, of course, but it will be hard for Mother to stop her from entering the nunnery, because we will after all be of age this month.”
I was no longer listening, but Hildegarde didn’t seem to notice. “Theodora is a charming woman—intelligent, too, in spite of being unaccountably willing to be involved with you. Why don’t you just marry her, Wizard?”
“Did Celia tell the Dog-Man that Antonia is my daughter?” I interrupted, heaving up out of the chair and seizing Hildegarde by the arms. Several times during her visit Antonia had hinted that she had met him earlier, in spite of Theodora’s attempts to keep her away.
Hildegarde eased out of my grip, looking puzzled. “Celia hasn’t told Cyrus anything. Don’t you remember? My parents have forbidden her all contact with him, convinced that he’s the one who made her decide to be a nun.”
If someone had told me this, it must have been while I was delirious. I settled back slowly into my chair. But if Antonia went and played with Cyrus, maybe asking him to repair a broken toy—or, even worse, to take her to see a dragon—that strange, sharp-featured man would learn soon enough that she was my daughter. And what better way to get at me, now that his warriors of bone and hair and his fenris-wolf had failed, than through Antonia?
“Quick!” I cried. “Find Theodora and bring her here!”
“Well,” said Hildegarde, bemused, “you mean my little suggestion has made you abruptly decide to propose marriage at last?”
“No! I mean, of course I want to marry her, but she won’t marry me. She has to get back to Caelrhon right away.”
“I’m not sure it’s a good plan either,” commented Hildegarde, “to send her away just because she has too much sense to want to tie herself to a wizard. She did take very good care of you while you were sick. I would never fall in love with a crotchety old wizard myself, but she gives every sign of it.”
“Just get her!” Hildegarde shook her head with a grin and went. I pushed myself out of the chair to find my shoes. I should be able to fly the air cart, even in my weakened condition, and it would get Theodora home faster than a horse. I hated for her to go, leaving everything between us more unresolved than ever, but we had to make sure Antonia did not come into further contact with Cyrus.
Now that he had been accepted into the seminary, rather than living on the docks, he might have no more time to play with the children, I tried to reassure myself as I tied my shoes. I even took the time to wonder if I really had become a crotchety old wizard. Maybe I should have told Hildegarde that Justinia, for one, thought my face and figure youthful and my power highly attractive.
Antonia skipped down the street to meet us, braids bouncing on her back. “Guess what!” she called. “Jen and I caught a baby rat and we’re going to raise him and teach him tricks. We’ll make him a little house to live in and keep him in our bedroom at night. We named him Cyrus.”
Theodora caught the girl up and hugged her hard. “I’m afraid a rat won’t make a very good pet,” she said then. “Does Jen’s mother know about this?”
“Well, if Jen’s mother won’t let us have the rat at her house,” said Antonia slowly, as though the girls had already thought this through, “can we have him in our house?”
A rat named Cyrus? I thought. It seemed a good choice.
Antonia hugged me too. “I’m getting a new tooth,” she told me proudly. “Are you all better? Mother said you were sick. The bishop took me to church with him one day and we prayed for you. Did I make you better?”
“You might have,” I said, smiling just from the pleasure of seeing her.
Antonia paused in skipping down the street to look back. “I asked the bishop if he had any little girls or boys of his own,” she informed us, “and do you know what he said? He said he was the father of everybody in Yurt and Caelrhon, including the grownups. Doesn’t that sound strange? Is he really?”
We went to see Jen and her mother and to get Theodora’s things. The tw
o women presented a united front against the concept of a rat as a pet.
“So have you come back for the ceremony?” Jen’s mother asked. “You mean you didn’t hear? Cyrus is going to receive the key to the city. They’re holding the ceremony at the covered market this evening.”
“Is that the Dog-Man?” asked Jen.
“That’s right,” said her mother. “The same man who fixed your doll this spring.” It chilled me to hear her speak so matter-of-factly about a supernatural event.
“I knew that,” said Antonia. “That’s why I wanted to name our rat for him.”
It didn’t sound then as though the girls had seen him recently. That was a relief. I wondered if receiving the key to the city was like getting the Golden Yurt. “I’d better go to this ceremony,” I told Theodora as we walked back to her house. “I want to see what’s been happening here.”
The Lady Maria had returned to the city from Yurt last week, once again bringing the Princess Margareta with her. I wasn’t sure of the details, but my guess was that the royal court of Caelrhon had decided that the chance that Paul would marry some foreign lady was preferable to the chance that their crown princess would be eaten by a wolf. I met the two at the castle and we went together to the covered market, me leaning on my old predecessor’s staff. On the way, I saw a woman chasing three rats out her front door with a broom, using words that I hadn’t even realized respectable Caelrhon housewives knew.
“Cyrus is so spiritual!” Maria told me enthusiastically. “Even though he worked such a striking miracle, it hasn’t made him at all puffed up and proud. When all of us come to revere and honor him each day, he just sits quietly or else speaks of God and the Last Judgment.” Princess Margareta looked bored, trailing along behind.
The streets around the covered market were packed. Townspeople in their finery moved through the warm evening air and between the pillars into the market, where clear-burning torches provided the light. Straw and bits of fallen vegetable lay underfoot. Something seemed unusual about the crowd, but I could not immediately place it. I managed to find a place at the back to lean against the wall, supporting myself on the silver-topped staff. The crowd spoke in quiet voices, but their words still bounced, magnified and jumbled, from the ceiling.
“I have to tell you, Wizard,” said the Lady Maria with a coy smile, speaking low so that Margareta could not hear us over the general din, “that I was the tiniest bit shocked when I learned you had had a daughter out of wedlock!” Her wide blue eyes glinted at me in the dimness. “That really was naughty of you, especially to take advantage of such a nice young lady. I’ve kept it from little Margareta because I think she may be a bit too young to understand. Now, I’ve seen and heard enough in my day that very little shocks me, but you know sometimes one imagines one knows someone very well, yet they still have secrets! That’s why Cyrus is so remarkable. I think he understands everything.”
I rather hoped Cyrus didn’t understand me. I saw him now, dressed all in black, his face sober and intent. He did not spot us in the crowd. But I felt a sudden chill on the back of my neck, as though a breeze were stirring on this still evening. “You haven’t told him about Antonia, have you?”
“I don’t tell secrets,” said Maria placidly. “I may have hinted that there was a certain wizard, not very far away, with sins that even a holy man might find hard to forgive, but as you can imagine I said nothing else!”
Before I had a chance to ask more, the mayor stepped up to a rostrum, flanked by candles, which had been erected at the far end of the market. He had been mayor for years, a solidly-built and honest man who always sought a way to keep his city’s life and commerce functioning separate from the cathedral, although literally in the cathedral’s shadow, and with the goodwill or at least tolerance of the priests. The light glittered on his chains of office. He waited a minute until conversation died down, then began, simply and informally.
“I don’t think I need to remind all of you what we owe to Cyrus,” he said. With wizardry I could hear him clearly, but the Lady Maria beside me strained to listen. Margareta, examining the cracked finish on one nail, seemed to be suggesting rather pointedly that she would rather be somewhere else. I thought I could detect a faint nervous tone in the mayor’s voice, which seemed rather surprising in someone who must have to give hundreds of public speeches.
“Cyrus has proven himself a true friend of the city of Caelrhon,” he continued. “We could make him a citizen, for all he’s foreign-born, but many men are born or made citizens. So the council has decided to offer him something we haven’t offered anyone in years—not even our own king!”
There was an appreciative chuckled from the crowd. King Lucas of Caelrhon had been known to grumble when visiting us in Yurt that the city seemed remarkably adept at evading his tolls and taxes, and apparently it looked much more amusing from their side than his.
“Cyrus, we want to give you the key to our city.”
Cyrus stepped forward then, a gratified look in the angle of his shoulders even though he did not smile. A gust of wind stirred the candles at the rostrum, and the torches flared. This was it? I asked myself as the mayor handed him an enormous ceremonial key, glittering with rhinestones. This was worth someone selling his soul to the devil, so he could have the mayor of a small city make him a presentation?
With my magically-enhanced hearing, I was able to catch the mayor’s next words, although they did not seem intended for anyone but Cyrus. “Next time you’re talking to the saints,” he said, not quite as though he were making a joke, “how about if you mention our problems with the rats?”
But then the crowd began to murmur appreciatively, yet in a low note, as though too deeply in awe to shout as they had shouted last month in front of the cathedral. Cyrus turned from one side to the other, holding up his hands as though in benediction, smiling but without the shattering goodness I was now able to convince myself I had never actually seen.
Instead he seemed to be soaking in the praise—and, I was almost afraid to say, worship—of the crowd like a lizard soaking in the sun’s rays. What had the Lady Maria said about people coming to honor and revere him? But this simple reverence did not now seem enough for him.
“Give God the glory!” he called, and the crowd repeated it. “Prepare for Judgment!” and his words were repeated again. “Hunt out sin!”
The evening breeze continued to rise, and in the torches’ glare his face was shaded red. The candles on the rostrum cast shadows from below that made his eyebrows enormous. Demonic, I would have called the effect, except that everything he said could have been said by Joachim—the words, but not his way of saying them.
“Overcome evil!” he shouted, and I clutched the silver-topped staff tighter. “Root out all sin! Destroy the works of the devil! Seize paradise as God has promised us!”
The crowd seemed almost choreographed, now starting to sway together, no longer repeating his phrases but steadily chanting, “Cyrus, Cyrus.” Their chant had the steady hard beat of a heart. The mayor, looking somewhat uneasy, slipped away into the night. The shouts from the crowd went higher as Cyrus lifted his hands, lower as he lowered them. The Lady Maria beside me joined in enthusiastically.
This, I thought, adulation like this might all be worth it.
And then I realized what was so odd about a crowd this size in the city of Caelrhon. It included no priests.
PART SIX - RATS
I
“I have spoken to him, of course,” said the bishop gravely, “and spoken more than once. But he always says his only interest is to bring himself closer to God by carrying the divine message of judgment and salvation to His flock.”
“You should stop him, Joachim. A bishop can certainly forbid Christians from listening to a charlatan who preaches false religion.”
We sat in the bishop’s study, where candlelight reflected on the dark window panes and made the wood paneling ruddy. There was a faint sound of scurrying in the walls that might have
been rats, though I had certainly never heard any in the bishop’s palace before.
Joachim answered me quietly, light and shadow flickering across his face. “But is he preaching false religion, Daimbert? I wish that I could say. It is true that I have told the cathedral priests not to attend his prayer meetings. But is a bishop who lacks the will to resign fit to judge a man who after all only teaches God’s message? Can there be sin in Christian preaching, even if done more spectacularly than by most and without the license of a sinful bishop?”
Joachim could sometimes be even more exasperating than Antonia. “Don’t tell me you’re still thinking of resigning! Didn’t I explain it to you? You and I were both infected by some spell of madness left in the bones of those undead warriors by whatever renegade wizard made them. I hope you realize I wouldn’t normally try to kill you any more than you would harbor lusty thoughts.”
“I was under a spell?” The bishop looked slightly ill at the idea.
“So was Celia—that’s why she suddenly decided to become a nun after insisting that she would never retreat from the world to the cloister, but instead become an active priest. And I think Cyrus is behind it. You know I’ve suspected him all along of working with a demon. Wait!” as Joachim seemed about to interrupt. “What I’m trying to ask you is, if he repented of his evil ways, including his attacks on Yurt, would he be able to save his soul after all by becoming a preacher?”
“It is very difficult for someone who has sold his soul to reclaim it,” said the bishop dubiously. “But I would not be so quick to condemn or to assume—”
“And I also had another question,” I said hastily, not wanting any lectures about forgiveness of one’s brother, since I had no intention of being Cyrus’s brother. “If someone sold his soul from pure motives, to save another’s life, would he regain it?”
I had told Joachim briefly about Antonia’s flying carpet ride when he asked after her. He looked at me a moment from his enormous dark eyes, then slowly started to smile. Whatever he had that passed for a sense of humor appeared at the strangest times. “If one were acting from completely pure motives, the devil might not accept the bargain. Do you know why, Daimbert,” he added in apparent inconsequentiality, “priests do not marry?”
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