Hounds of God

by Tarr, Judith

  “Just barely.” Alun was alight with mockery, but he was obedient enough. For the moment. He linked arms with Nikki and drew him forward. “Come, cousin! This is no day for dreaming. The sun’s high and the city’s wild, and Misrule is lord.” He leaned close, laughing, grey eyes dancing. “Why, they say the King himself has put off his crown and turned commoner—or maybe that’s he in cap and bells, dispensing judgments from Saint Brendan’s altar.”

  Nikki laughed and ran with him, eeling through the crowd. To watch—that was wonderful. To be in it was sheer delight.

  They cheered the rope-dancer on his lofty thread. They devoured meat pies—paid for with kisses because the buxom seller would not take money from such handsome lads; and Alun blushed like a girl but paid up manfully, to Nikki’s high amusement. They heard a minstrel sing mournfully of love and an orator declaim of war. They whirled into a street dance and whirled out of it again, breathless, warm as if they had stood by a fire.

  Near the gate of the cathedral, a conjurer plied his trade. They watched him critically. Brave man, Alun said in Nikki’s mind, to bring his trickery here.

  He was very clever, but he had not gathered much of a crowd. A fool, Nikki decided, to think his cups and apples and scarves would earn him a living in the city of the Elvenking. But yes, brave, and good-natured too, although he looked as if he had not eaten well in a long while.

  Nikki’s eyes slid, to find Alun’s sliding likewise. Should we?

  Nikki set his lip between his teeth. Alf would be appalled.

  So would Father.

  They stood still. Those were names of power and terror. And neither would be so unsubtle as to deal out a whipping.

  Oh, no. The Chancellor and the King were much more deadly. They flayed not with the rod but with the mind and the tongue.

  And yet.

  It was the Feast of Fools. The one day in all the year when the world turned upside down.

  Alun laughed aloud and Nikki in silence. You first, the Prince said, magnanimous.

  Nikki bowed assent. The conjurer had not marked them. They were only a pair of boys amid the throng, and he was making a scarf vanish into the air.

  It was to come back as a sprig of holly. Nikki began to smile.

  The scarf melted as it was meant to. The man’s hands wove in intricate passes. At the height of them, Nikki loosed a flicker of power. There in the man’s hand lay a newborn rose, pink as a maiden’s blush.

  Brave indeed, was that poor conjurer. He paused only an eyeblink and continued as if nothing had gone amiss.

  Alun bit down on laughter. The holly—now a rose— should become a cup of water. A cup indeed it was, but it steamed, giving forth a wondrous fragrance of wine and spices. That attracted a passerby or three. Particularly when the wine, cooling, sprouted the leaves of a vine, growing and twining in the air, blossoming, setting into cascades of purple grapes.

  The conjurer knew he had gone mad. Knew, and laughed with the wonder of it.

  The vine faded dreamlike. But the cup was full of coins. Copper mostly; neither Nikki nor Alun had gold to spend. Still, it was more than the mountebank had earned in a month of traveling; and more had clinked into the bowl at his feet. People in Caer Gwent knew when they had seen real magic.

  oOo

  “Was that a sin?” Alun wondered as they drank hot ale in a tavern beyond the cathedral.

  Nikki shrugged. It had not felt like one. And the man was happy, and would sleep warm tonight and eat well; maybe he would not drink away all his money at once.

  “Someone will tell him what happened,” said Alun. “Someone should have told him before he came here. But he had quick hands. I wonder if I could do what he did?”

  It only took practice. Like swordplay, or writing.

  Alun nodded. He was adept at both. “Or like power itself.” He wrapped his hands around the mug, warming them, taking in the tavern with quicksilver eyes. Most of the people knew who he was, but out of courtesy they let him be.

  It pricked him a little, for he was proud, and yet it pleased him. He lounged on his stool like a man of the world, or at least like a squire on holiday. “And soon I shall be one,” he said.

  In a year or two, maybe.

  “That’s not long.”

  Only half an eon.

  Alun made as if to throw his mug at Nikki’s head. “Will you never learn respect?”

  Nikki grinned, thoroughly unrepentant.

  “Insolent Greek.” The Prince sighed with great feeling. “It’s the women, surely. They spoil you, drooping after you and pleading for a glance from your black eyes. How many conquests now, Nikephoros?”

  Nikki’s grin began to hurt, but he kept it staunchly.

  “Myriads,” Alun answered himself. “More loves than stars in the sky; more kisses than—”

  The inn-girl, hastening past with a fistful of emptied tankards, stumbled and fell full into Alun’s lap. Without a thought, with the instinct of her calling, she kissed him soundly and rolled to her feet again as if she had never paused.

  Nikki applauded, shaping words in his mind as he seldom troubled to do. Bravo, cousin! At today’s pace, you’ll be passing me yet.

  “Heaven forbid!”

  Nikki laughed his soundless laughter and drained his tankard. The ale sat well and comfortably in his stomach; the inn was clean and only a little crowded, no tax upon his senses. And the company...

  The King’s sole and much beloved son had gone back to his exploration of faces. Minds, no; that was the courtesy of the Kindred, strict as any written law. But they all loved to study their shortlived cousins, the other-folk who filled the world and boasted that they ruled it.

  They, and they. Nikki inspected his own hand on the table. Narrow wiry young man’s hand, brown even in winter, with a white crisscross of scratches—he had had an argument with a cat a little while ago. The cat had repented almost at once. Quick in their tempers, cats were.

  He was none so slow himself, although people called him gentle. That was his damnable calf-eyed face, and his silence. The former he could not help, short of acquiring some frightful and impressive scar. The latter was more troublesome.

  His sister raged at him. Anna was visibly and publicly volatile, and voluble too. It did little good to shut eyes and mind against her. She would pummel him until he opened them, or pursue him until he yielded. “Idiot!” she cried. “Lazy slouching fool! Open your mouth and talk!”

  The half of it that he could do, he would not, setting his lips together with stubbornness to match her own.

  Her eyes snapped with fury. “You could if you would try. You know how. Alf taught you. Years he spent, while you sat like a block of wood, stubborn as a mule and twice as lazy. It’s work to make words, even in your head. Make them aloud? Who needs them?” His glance echoed her speech. She struck out at him, almost shouting. “You need them, Nikephoros Akestas. Look at you! Grown already and playing kiss-in-corners with every girl in Caer Gwent, and mute as a fish. The Kindred don’t need to talk, either, but they do. Every one of them. And they’re not even human.”

  Am I? It was a gift of sorts although its tone was bitter, words spoken into her mind.

  “You are!” She seized him. She was very small, a little brown bird, all bones and temper. “You are human, Nikephoros. Flesh and blood and bone—human. You eat and you sleep and you run after women. If you keep running, one of them will bring you up short with a bouncing black-eyed bastard as human as yourself. And when your time comes, you’ll stop running altogether; you’ll stiffen and you’ll age and you’ll die.”

  Does that make me human?

  “You can’t deny your blood.”

  He laughed without sound, with a twist that came close to pain. Blood was one thing. There was also the brain, and what lay in it. Fine handsome youth that he was, not an utter disgrace as a squire, making up somewhat in quickness for what he lacked in size and strength; not too ill a scholar though easily distracted by small things, a girl, a cat,
a new bit of witchery. Who would believe the truth? Youth and pride and black eyes and all, he remained a pitiable thing, a half-made man, a cripple.

  Anna slapped him hard. “You’re no more crippled than I am. Less. I can only hear sounds. You hear minds. And sounds when it suits you, whatever your ears may lack.”

  He could never hit her back. It was not chivalry; it was plain cowardice. In his mind where it mattered, she was still the tall, terrible, omnipotent elder sister; and he was five years old, a roil of nameless feelings, a pair of eyes in a world that had no words—a silence that was a lack, but a lack he did not recognize.

  Until that one came. Before names or words, he was only he, the stranger who came from the vast world outside the gate, hair more white than gold around a frightful sun-flayed face. But he beckoned; he fascinated. He was not like anything else. And when Nikki ventured near him, the world reeled and cracked and opened. And there were words and names, things, actions, ideas to smite him with their utter abstraction, a whole world focused on an alien thing.

  Sound. Alf gave him words, because it was Alf’s nature to heal and to teach, to open minds and bodies to all that they could know. But he had not known the extent of his own power, until Nikki—human, mortal, utterly earthbound—waking to words, woke also to what had begotten them. Power; witchery. White magic. The healing, in striving to mend what could not be mended, had wrought a new sense in place of the lost one.

  The small half-savage child had not even known what it was. For a little while, in his innocence, he had even been glad, thinking that now at last he was like everyone else.

  The young man knew he was like no one at all. He could not speak. He could not.

  “You won’t,” Anna said. “It would spoil your game.”

  Sometimes, when he could bear it no longer, he would shout at her. He had a voice, oh yes. A hideous strangled animal-howl of a voice. It always drove her away—or himself, driven by her ears’ revolt.

  But she always flung the last of it at him, whether it was he who fled or she: “They’ll go away, all the Kindred you cling so close to. And then where will you be?”

  Alun was studying him steadily, without diffidence. Reading him with ease, head tilted, frowning a very little. “You’re one of us,” he said.

  Nikki’s fingers knotted. Suddenly he leaped up; grinned; pulled Alun after him. The innkeeper caught the coin he flung; bowed and beamed, for it was silver. He whirled back into the festival.

  3.

  The moon was high and white and cold, the wind wild, shrilling on the stones. Far below thundered the sea, casting up great gleaming gouts of spray.

  Alf followed the long line of the battlements, circling round to that corner which jutted like the prow of a white ship. The wind whipped the breath from his lungs; he laughed into it, and stumbled a little.

  Surprised, he looked down. His foot had caught on a small crumpled shadow: cloth, a softness of fur, a heap of garments abandoned by the parapet.

  He smiled wryly and gathered them up, warming them under his cloak. High above the castle soared a seabird, abroad most unnaturally in this wind-wild midnight.

  But then, in or about Caer Gwent, nothing was unnatural.

  The bird spiraled downward. It flew well, strong on the strong wind. Alf’s ears, unhuman-keen, caught a high exultant cry. His smile warmed and widened.

  Wings beat above his head. Gull’s shape, young gull’s plumage, dark in the moon.

  Whiteness blossomed out of it. Toes touched stone where claws had been; Alun lowered his arms, breathless, tumble-haired, and naked as a newborn child.

  He dived into the shelter of Alf’s cloak, clasping him tightly, grinning up at him. “Did you see, Alf? Did you see what I did?”

  “I could hardly avoid it,” Alf said dryly. “So it’s a shape-changer you are then. How long?”

  “Ages.” Alf’s look was stern; Alun laughed. “Well then, Magister. Since just before my birthday. October the thirty-first: All Hallows’ Eve.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course! It’s been a secret, though Mother knows. She’s been teaching me. She was there when it happened, you see. We were playing with the wolf cubs, and I thought, How wonderful to be one! and I was. I was very awkward—and very surprised.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I like to be a wolf. But a gull is more interesting. I think I fly rather well.”

  Alf helped him to dress, swiftly, for he was already blue with cold. When he was well wrapped in fur and linen and good thick wool, warming from the skin inward, he returned to Alf’s cloak.

  “You’re always warm,” he said. “How do you do it?”

  “How do you fly?”

  Alun considered that and nodded. “I see. Only I can’t... quite... see.”

  “You only have to will it. Warmth like a fire always. No cold; no discomfort.”

  “Not even in summer?”

  Alun’s gaze was wide, innocent. Alf cuffed him lightly. “Imp! In summer you think coolness. Or you suffer like everyone else.”

  “I do. You never seem to suffer at all.”

  “It’s known as discipline. Which leads me to ask, are you supposed to be out here at this hour?”

  “Well...”

  “Well?”

  “No one told me not to.” Alun tilted his head, eyes glinting. “Are you?”

  Alf laughed. “In fact, no. I should be safe in bed. But I couldn’t sleep, and for once Thea could.”

  “It’s not easy to have a baby, is it? Especially toward the end.”

  “No. But she doesn’t complain.”

  “She’s very proud of herself,” Alun said. “And happy—sometimes I look at her and all I see is light.”

  “I, too,” Alf said softly.

  “Your children will be very beautiful and very strong and very wise. Like your lady—like you. Can you see, Alf? He looks like both of you together, but she has your face. She’s laughing; she has flowers in her hair. I—” Alun laughed breathlessly. “I think I’m in love with her. And she isn’t even born yet!”

  Alf looked down at his rapt face, himself with wonder and a touch of awe. Another seer, with clearer sight in this than he had ever had. He smoothed the tousled hair, drawing his cloak tighter around the thin body. Alun was warm now, growing drowsy as a child will, all at once, eyes full still of prophecy.

  It could be tantalizing, that gift they both had, drawing the mind inward, laying bare all that would be. All the beauty; all the terror.

  Alf caught his breath. It was dark. Black dark and bone-cold. Thank God, sighed a small soundless voice, that the beauty is his to see, and not—

  He could not see. Could only know as the blind know, in darkness, the slight boy-shape, all bones and thin skin, gripping him with sudden strength. “Alf. Alf, what’s wrong?”

  Light grew slowly. Moonlight; cold starlight; Alun’s face, thin and white and very young, brave against the onslaught of fear. His cheeks were stiff with cold. “You’re seeing again,” he said. “All the bad things. But they’ll pass—you’ll see.”

  Alf shuddered from deep within. This was not like the rest of his visions; they were brutally vivid, as dreams can be, or true Seeing. When his inner eye went blind, then truly was it time for fear, for his mind would not face what his power foresaw.

  Yet Alun saw beyond, into sunlight.

  He drew a slow breath. Was it his own death then that he went to? He had never feared it; had longed for it, prayed for it, through all his long years in the cloister. How like Heaven to offer it now, when at last he had something to live for.

  He smiled at Alun and warmed the frozen face with his hands. “Yes,” he said. “The bad things will pass. Then there’ll be only sunlight, and flowers in a girl’s hair.” His smile went wicked. “I can guess who’ll put them there.”

  Alun’s cheeks flamed hotter even than Alf’s palms. But his eyes were steady, bright with moonlight and mirth. “Will you object?”

  �
�Only if she does.”

  “She won’t,” said Alun with certainty.

  4.

  “Check,” said Anna.

  “Mate,” said the Bishop of Sarum.

  She looked from his endangered king to her own truly conquered one, and laughed aloud. “Father Jehan! I almost did it.” Her mirth died; her brows met ominously. “Or did you—”

  He spread his hands, the image of outraged innocence. “Anna Chrysolora! Would I stoop so low as to let you win?”

  “You have before.” But she did not credit it herself. Not this time. She had fought a battle to tell tales of, and he had—almost—fallen.

  She let her grin have its way. “I’ll have you yet,” she promised him.

  He laughed his deep infectious laugh and saluted her with her own ivory bishop. “Here’s to courage! Another match, milady?”

  As she paused, considering, lutestrings sang across the hall, a melody like the washing of waves, three notes rising and falling over and over, endlessly. A recorder wove into it, high and clear and lilting as birdsong.

  The Queen herself played on the pipe. The lutenist—O rarity!—was the King’s own Chancellor. He was ridiculously shy of playing and singing in company, but his skill was as precious-rare as his displaying of it.

  They clustered round him, the court, all the Kindred: Thea banked in cushions at his feet, Alun drowsing against her; Nikki with lovely Tao-Lin in his lap; Gwydion stretched out like a boy in a bed of hounds and Fair Folk.

  Alf’s voice grew out of the music, soft, achingly pure.

  “Chanson do·lh mot son plan e prim

  farai pois que boton oill vim;

  e l’auzor

  son de color

  de manta flor....

  “‘A song I’ll make of words both plain and fine, for the buds are on the bough, and the trees bear the colors of a mantle of flowers....’”

  They gave him their accolade, a full ten breaths of silence. Thea broke it with laughter both tender and teasing. “My lord, my lord, you torment us—such yearning for spring, here in the very heart of winter.”