The rain struck right behind the lightning, sheets and sheets of wild, wind-driven, blinding rain. Rain so thick that it was now impossible to see across the square. Rain that extinguished the fire in the belfry. Armine was a big, powerful man. He circled Chiara and the bishop in his arms and sheltered them against the blast until both wind and rain died down enough for them to flee the palace porch into the half-ruined cathedral. It was of Roman construction, stone and concrete, and, except for a few holes in the roof on one side, it remained hospitable, warm and dry.
A second later, Regeane reached the hilltop herself. Both of the men she had been pursuing were gone. She had expected to see them on the downslope leading to the gate. The same blinding rain hit that had struck the square, slowing the wolf again.
Where? Where had they gone? One side of the street was a wall supporting a villa on a still-higher hill, but on the right side what had been a drop had become a tree-covered slope—steep to be sure, but climbable—that led down to a marshy swamp the river flooded every spring.
Regeane slowed, the wind and rain lashed her, soaking her fur and chilling her body. But her blood was up and she longed for the kill. The ancient dreams of females in wolf packs long ago commanded her, called out to her heart. O little one, new one, for this you were born. When there were no humans, when we ruled and roamed the earth’s hardest, most difficult places, glaciers, deserts of snow and ice, plains where grass dies in the scorching summer heat and fuels wildfires that darken the sky, forests, green forests where rain never stops, once in all of these we ruled and prospered. Strong and without fear. O most dangerous of mortals, drive your prey before you and strike it down.
Yes, there they were! Forging their way down the slope through the brush. Weeds, blackberry, canes, wild roses, scrub pine, birch, and low-growing oak were making travel difficult. But if they could gain the river . . . She saw several small boats moored in the shallows; if they managed to get to one of those, they might escape. Once downstream they could lose themselves in the vast wetlands—only half tamed even in Roman times—of the Po valley.
Not even the wolves could trail them into the endless thickets of reeds, cattails, scattered islands, and tiny waterways formed by the river. Beyond lay the coast and ships that could take them away forever from any possible pursuit.
No, Regeane thought. No.
She leaped the low stone curb separating the street from the slope. Down she went, half running, half sliding through mud churned by freshets started by the teeming rain pouring down the slope. She half slid, half ran until the hill grew less steep, and she found better footing on grass and tall weeds, golden broom stitched with the thorny canes of wild roses.
The blow took her by surprise. One of them had turned and broken a heavy cudgel from a scrub oak. She staggered and he thrust the branch in her face, trying for her eyes. Enraged, she went for his throat, failed, and fell back as one of the sharp branches pierced her shoulder. She cried out in pain, trying to get her legs under her, but something that felt like the effective end of a battering ram slammed into her.
Maeniel, coming in hard, fast, and murderous. He hamstrung the man and tore out his throat.
Robert was hard on Maeniel’s heels. He spared his foe’s jerking body only a glance and closed on the last of the murderers, the boy who had confessed in the square.
He turned at bay, back to a thick, twisted willow trunk. Robert was upon him.
The two wolves simply watched. The mercenary had one last trick. He threw up his hands and said, “No!” as if in abject surrender. Then he went for Robert’s eyes with two fingers of one hand and—somehow he had a knife—he went for Robert’s belly, an underhand slash, with the other.
Robert, still coming down the slope, wasn’t fooled for a moment. He tucked in his chin, half turned, and drove his own knife up through the diaphragm, through one lobe of the lung, and into the pericardium of his foe. In return, he took a wicked slash through the muscles of his left side below the ribs. But then his elbow snapped back, tearing the knife from the mercenary’s hand, leaving him staring down at Robert’s dagger protruding from just below his ribs. Robert backed away.
The two men’s eyes met.
“It is mortal,” the boy said, his hands clutching at Robert’s knife.
“You will live until I pull it free,” Robert told him.
“Have I killed you, too?” the boy asked.
For the first time Robert realized he was wounded. He explored the gash with the fingers of his right hand. “No, it is into the meat,” he said.
“I’m glad,” the boy said. “Enough has been done. I began it. I saw her when we crossed the river to take Desiderius’s pay. I worked on the minds of the others. She smiled at me. She was beautiful. I hated you. I knew I would never have anything like that for my own. I don’t know you; but I hated you.”
Robert’s hand reached forward and snapped shut around the hilt of his knife.
“Watch out.”
Regeane heard the outcry from behind her and saw those remaining friends of Robert’s were standing on the road looking down.
“I think not,” Maeniel said. He was human and was trying to untangle his chain from a bush.
Robert placed his left arm like a bar across his foe’s chest.
“Forgive me?” the boy asked.
“No,” Robert said. “But I will let you ask God’s forgiveness. I would not have you burn in hell. You have but a moment.”
“I know,” the boy said. “My heart stutters. My chest is filled with blood. Wait.” He closed his eyes.
They waited, Robert, the men standing in the road, Regeane, and Maeniel. He was now wolf again. Then the boy’s eyes opened. He grabbed Robert’s wrist and jerked his hand back, pulling the knife free. It was followed by a terrible gush of blood.
The boy’s eyes widened. A look of surprise spread over his features. “It doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would,” he said, and then slumped down and died.
Robert staggered back a few paces, then sat down among the reeds in the muddy water and rested his forehead on his knees.
Regeane and Maeniel continued down the slope. Regeane was frightened for Maeniel. If he tried to swim the river with the chain around his neck, he might drown. But when they reached the bottom, Robert seized the collar around Maeniel’s neck and tried to bend it open bare-handed. At first he had no success, but then suddenly, aided by a massive thrust of raw power, the collar twisted open in his hands. Robert didn’t know how he’d done what he’d done, but Regeane and Maeniel both heard the bear’s voice.
“Go ahead, run away, I can’t stop you. And I certainly don’t want you to drown. I want that fine body of yours undamaged—and your wife. I’ll get her, too. Just you wait and see if I don’t.”
Maeniel vanished into the reeds and thick water plants at the river’s edge. Robert hugged Regeane. For a moment, she rested her muzzle on his shoulder, then she, too, pulled away and was gone.
Inside the cathedral the bishop was occupied with the wounded. He was testy, cranky, and in very bad humor. Armine was helping him. This particular man was whining and moaning about an arrow sticking in his upper arm.
“It will mortify and I will die. The archers smear poison on them,” the man cried. “Please, please, tell me I won’t die.”
“Shut up, Avold,” the bishop snapped. “There’s no poison on these arrows. The archers the king hires are too frightened of the stuff and too plain bone lazy to bother.”
“You know a lot about this,” Armine said.
“Yes,” the bishop told him. “In my youth I was a notable warrior until the last king, the one preceding the present devious crook on the throne, decided he needed a bishop he was sure would not be a servant of the pope as head of this see.”
At just this moment, the man the bishop was examining let out a blood-curdling scream. Not surprising, as the bishop had pushed the arrowhead through his shoulder and out the other side, then snapped the shaft, thus rem
oving it all.
The bishop threw away the broken arrow, saying, “Now you’re cured. Shut up.”
When Armine tried to staunch the blood flowing from his patient’s shoulder, the bishop snapped, “No, no. Let it stop of itself. The blood will carry away any poison still left in the wound. Then put a clean bandage on him and send him home. There he can annoy his wife instead of me.” Then the bishop moved on to the next casualty.
This one was quiet, pale, and very still. He seemed deeply unconscious. “Oh, God,” the bishop whispered. “The only compensation I have had in my stint as the king’s bishop is not to have to look at this sort of thing very often. He is gut shot and will almost surely die. All I can do is prepare opium and give it to his wife.” The bishop shook his head and rose to his feet.
He turned toward the next but Armine pulled him aside. “My lord,” Armine whispered. “I have reason to believe my daughter is . . .”
“Is what?” the bishop snarled. “Out with it, man, what? Pregnant?” His voice was loud.
“No. No. Shush. Be quiet. No, I don’t think she’s pregnant.”
“Well, what then? In heaven’s name, man, what?”
“Possessed.”
“Possessed? In God’s name—” The bishop spat. “In God’s thrice holy name, what are you maundering about? Possessed, my ass—my horse’s ass, my goat’s ass. Possessed? In a pig’s ass.
“Of course she’s possessed. They’re all possessed at that age. The boys, too. They are worse than the girls. At least girls are quiet about it. They are trapped in a mire of hot desire and fear of fulfillment. Yes, the boys, too. They have sex on the brain—all of them. Marry her off, you idiot. And see he is a man, you hear? A man, not a mincing fool. And she will be fine, and you will have grandchildren. You will both be happy. Fool, lack-wit, idiot. I am ridden by a plague of fools. Not the least of which is that treacherous royal sneak that occupies the throne. Ah, what I would give to have his father back . . . Yes, marry her off and not to that vicious little spider of a sorcerer Hugo.”
“No,” Armine said. “But I think no one need worry about Hugo any longer. I got a good look at his face before we ran to the cathedral. I think he’s dead.”
“Yes,” the bishop said. “I agree. A fitting end for the drunken scoundrel. I, too, fear the lightning did its work well.”
“Not well enough,” someone said.
Armine, facing the bishop, saw his jaw drop. He spun around and saw Hugo, standing in the archway leading from the vestibule of the cathedral, just stepping into the light of the candle’s fitful illumination.
“I regret to say,” Hugo told the bishop with a half-savage, half-triumphant grin, “I am still alive and not even badly injured.”
Chiara, who was across the aisle helping some of the women tear a shift into linen bandages, looked up and gasped. She rose to her feet, seemingly transfixed, and then moved slowly toward Hugo. He smiled at her, the same savage grin he’d given Armine. His eyes sparkled with malice and intelligence, and he spoke in a low voice to Chiara who was, by now, only a few feet away.
Armine felt his mouth go dry. He swallowed a lump in his throat. No! Against all reason, against the evidence of his senses, he knew that what he was looking at—whatever he was looking at—it was not Hugo.
Only Chiara heard what it said to her, heard the words spoken by Hugo’s mouth, tongue, and throat. “The way things are turning out is wonderful. Now, at last, I have a body of my own.”
Chiara slumped to the floor in a faint, but did herself no injury because, with a look of utter longing and devotion, Hugo caught her and eased her to the marble tiles, ever so gently smoothing her hair back with one hand with great tenderness as he did so.
“I wouldn’t put anything past that galloping bitch,” Lucilla told Dulcinia. “Of all the bad luck, to be recognized on our first outing.”
“Poor planning, I call it,” Dulcinia said. “You should have known you were too prominent to escape detection.”
“Well, we could have landed in worse places,” Lucilla said.
This was true. Ansgar was not a cruel or violent man. Lucilla sent the men Rufus had lent her home to Nepi well compensated and carrying a rueful note to the pope admitting Ansgar had detected her intentions and would not assist her in further inquiries as to the location of the Frankish queen. Otherwise, Ansgar was the perfect host. It was spring. The countryside near the town was tranquil. Ansgar’s brother, the bishop Gerald, was a devoted falconer. His hawks shared the church with his parishioners on Sunday, and after mass he rode out into the cool, fresh morning air accompanied by what Lucilla guessed was about half the town on horseback and on foot while he hunted with hawks and hounds.
His was a necessary contribution to the community. Migratory birds could and did devastate spring plantings. He and his fellow hunters reduced their flocks and frightened away a substantial number of the largest flights so that the crop could span the dangerous period of tender and succulent green youth to mature into bread wheat.
The daily harvest of woodcock, songbirds, rabbits, and the more slender, agile hare was prominently featured in the banquets that crowned almost every evening. Dulcinia sang at the banquets and, by popular and constant demand, at every other ceremony that offered even the slightest excuse for celebration of any kind: birthdays, weddings, christenings, saints’ name days, all religious ceremonies, mass, te deums, benedictions, all the way down to humble funerals where the widow often found herself comforted by a magnificent rendition of “Stabat Mater” or “Panis Angelicus.”
In fact, several die-hard pagans converted, simply because it gave them the opportunity to hear Dulcinia’s voice during their baptismal ceremonies. Gerald, the bishop, was happy to have her sing before, during, and after mass. Next to his hawks, Dulcinia’s art was his greatest pleasure. He would sit quietly while she sang, leaning back in his heavy, wooden throne at the altar, his eyes closed, with a great smile on his face.
One beautiful spring morning, Lucilla sat in the new cathedral, listening to her friend’s voice soar and sharing the almost ecstatic peace the bishop and his congregation radiated during her friend’s performance, wondering where it all came from. Although unfinished, the cathedral still managed to be beautiful. The walls were painted with important scenes from the life of Christ by a painter who had studied in, of all places, Athens. They were done in a fantastic, wind-blown style in light, bright colors on white stucco walls. The Marriage at Cana was celebrated with Christ as a beardless youth with dark, curly hair, seated with his mother among the wedding guests, crowned with laurel. On the other side of the church he was visiting in the temple, smiling, instructing his apparently astonished and delighted elders. Behind the altar he was the risen Christ, his wounds not relics of mortal pain and sorrow but the ornaments of a great conqueror rising victorious over evil and death.
Lucilla was an educated woman, to be sure, but she’d read the ancient historians and philosophers. They told of a people, self-denying, cruel, exploitative, madly militaristic, addicted to savage conquests, grinding their heels into the necks of every people within reach of their armies. A people who exterminated all who resisted their exactions and doomed the submissive to chattel slavery, enforced with the cruelest and most drastic punishments. A people whose idea of entertainment was the imaginatively savage slaughter of other human beings; a people who reveled in rivers of gold and rivers of blood.
And they had come to this: sitting in a church on a fair, cool spring morning, worshiping a God who preached innocence, forgiveness, and love. Listening to the voice of a girl who was an abandoned child, but who could outsing the lark rising up high and higher into the sunrise. Even the simplest things are a puzzle, Lucilla thought. And the greatest of all gifts is to know how ignorant we are. To grasp the vast, dim outlines of what we do not and cannot possibly know.
Then Dulcinia’s song ended. She left the altar steps and genuflected to the everlasting presence. Gerald blessed her, saying the beau
ty of her art contributed to the greater glory of God. Lucilla came as close to prayer as she ever did—and just as well, because the next day the pleasant idyll ended and trouble visited the city.
Ansgar rode off at dawn. The brigand Trudo, who had forced Lucilla and Dulcinia to bribe him at the ford, was troubling merchants journeying to the city with imported goods for sale. Ansgar decided reluctantly that he could tolerate Trudo’s depredations no longer. Among the goods the merchants carried to the city was salt, and Trudo was insisting on being paid in this valuable commodity. Ansgar’s landlocked principality had no other source, and if Trudo continued to steal it, the citizens would be reduced to dire straits.
“He has to be cleaned out once and for all,” Ansgar told Lucilla in the early predawn hours as he made ready to leave.
Stella created a scene. Weeping, scratching her face, rending her garments, throwing dust on her head.
Gerald, who’d exchanged his shepherd’s staff for a sword and mail shirt without visible inconvenience, stood looking on indulgently while Stella had hysterics.
“Whatever else I may have thought of her,” Lucilla said darkly, “I always believed Stella a level-headed person, but this—”
Gerald shrugged. “She’s been like this since they met in Ravenna. I think she believes he will not think she loves him if she doesn’t take on when he goes off to fight.”
“I suppose . . . so,” Dulcinia said, “but still . . . my heavens—”
Ludolf, roused from his sickbed by the commotion—he’d inherited Stella’s tendency to the spring malaise—came down to help console his mother. Stella fainted into a convenient armchair, well furnished with large cushions. Ludolf held one hand, Dulcinia the other.
Stella cried out, “Thank God my son remains here. So that if you, my darling, the strength of my soul, the light of my eyes, perish, I will at least have him to console me in the brief time I linger like an unquiet spirit in the twilight of my sorrow in this vale of tears. Oh, woe. Woe. Woe.”
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