Hounds of God

by Tarr, Judith

  His eyes met hers and sparked. “There is fitness,” he said, “and there is fitness. Take this to heart and mind, milady”—sudden and swift and fierce, all passion, all mockery:

  “No vuoill de Roma l’emperi

  ni c’om m’en fassa apostoli,

  q’en lieis non aia revert

  per cui m’art lo cars e·m rima;

  e si·l maltraich no·m restaura

  ab un baisar anz d’annou

  mi auci e si enferna!

  “‘I would not wish to be the Emperor of Rome, nor make me its Pope, that I could not return to her for whom my heart both burns and breaks; if she will not restore me from this torment with a kiss before the new year—then me she slays, herself she sends to Hell!’”

  “Bravo!” they all cried as the lute thundered to a halt.

  “You heard him, Thea,” Alun said. “And here it is, almost Twelfth Night. You’d better do it quickly before his prophecies come true.”

  But before she could struggle up, Alf had her, drawing her bulk easily into his lap. She glowered at him. “Coercion, this,” she said darkly. “Compulsion by poetry. Cruel, unusual—”

  He sighed, languishing. “Then I am slain, alas. Or shall I take refuge on Saint Peter’s throne?”

  “I yield, I yield!” And after a goodly while: “You wouldn’t.” His eyes were glinting. “Dear God! I believe you would.”

  oOo

  “Imagine it,” said Jehan. “Pope—what? Innocent? Boniface, with that bonny face of his? He wouldn’t be the first enchanter in the Holy See, and he’s closer to a saint than most who’ve sat there.”

  Anna’s brows went up. “Some would say there’s no ‘close’ about it. Thea for one. Though to my mind, the distance is just exactly the breadth of her body.”

  That, coming from a woman and one of breeding besides, disconcerted the Bishop not at all. In fact it delighted him. “Anna my love, we should loose you on the schools.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “They’d never survive it.”

  “Oh, but what a wonder to watch them fall, laid low by one woman’s wit.”

  “Poor proud creatures.” She took the ivory bishop from his hand, returning it to its home on the board. “I rather pity them. Masters and scholars, clerics all, professing a celibacy few care to observe—and they fulminate at length on the frailty of the female. Should I be the one to disabuse them?”

  “It might do them good.”

  She shook her head. “No. Let them play. I’ve enough to do here with all these wild witch-children.”

  “Children!” He laughed. “Some of them are ancient.”

  “Do years matter to them?”

  He looked hard at her. He had a sharp eye, and a mind sharper still behind the battered soldier’s face. “Anna. Is everything well with you?”

  “Of course.” She said it clearly, without wavering, even with a smile and a glint of mischief. “Let me guess. You worry. Little Anna’s not so little any more. And here she is where she’s been for the past dozen years, living in Caer Gwent, studying what and when it suits her, traveling when the urge strikes her, lacking for nothing. Except that any self-respecting woman of her age ought to be safely married, whether to a suitable man or to God.”

  “Do you want that?” he asked.

  “I never have. I’d like to go on and on as I am. Except...”

  “Except?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. This is an odd place to live in, don’t you know? All the magic. All the Folk—the wonders; the strangenesses. You’d think after more than half my life here I’d be used to it. But I’m not. I can remember when I was little, living in the City. Mother, Father, Irene; Corinna—do you remember her? Franks killed her. They killed my whole City. But Alf and Thea took me away, took me in and brought me up, taught me and tended me and loved me. They gave me so much; still give it, unstinting. I don’t think anyone has been as fortunate as I am.

  “But you see, it can’t last. Sooner or later they’ll go away. Probably sooner. Then where will I be?”

  “Where people have always been when they grow up.”

  “Alone.”

  “Alone, maybe. But luckier than most. You have wealth, you have learning; you can live as you please.”

  “I can, can’t I?” She took his large hand in her own very small one. “In that case, I know whom I want for my knight.”

  “What! Not one of the handsome fellows here?”

  “None of them is also a bishop.”

  “You are clever, taking in heaven and earth in one fell swoop.”

  “Why not, when it’s so convenient?”

  He laughed and bowed extravagantly and kissed her hand. “At your service, then, fair lady, and gladly too.” He rose. “Shall we abandon the chessboard for a turn of the dance?”

  oOo

  They were dancing indeed, steps and music new from Paris, with variations that were all Rhiyana. Even the humans here had an air, a grace that was not quite of their kind, a hint of magic. It made their court the fairest in the world; it made their dancing wonderful.

  Nikki whirled out of a wild estampie, dropping to the floor beside Thea, lying for a moment in a simple ecstasy of stillness. He grinned at her; she smiled back and patted his cheek. “Handsome boy,” she said. “When I finish atoning for my last sin, will you help me commit another?”

  He laughed. His breath was coming back. He sat up, appropriating a share of her cushions, settling with the ease and completeness of a cat. The dance spun on; would spin the night away with hardly a pause, beating down the old year, pressing out the new.

  Thea, bound to earth by the weight of her body, could only watch. She played with Nikki’s hair, smoothing it, trying to tame it. It curled, which was fashionable; it curled riotously, which was not.

  Women always yearned to stroke it. But only Thea could do that when and as she pleased.

  He looked at her and stifled a sigh. She was so very beautiful. They worried a little, Alf, the King; she was not well made for childbearing, too slight, too narrow. But she was strong; she had carried well, with both grace and pride. She had been riding and dancing right up to Yuletide.

  His teeth clicked together. He examined her more closely. She was unwontedly sedentary tonight, content to recline like an eastern queen, gravid, serene. But Thea was never, ever serene.

  Was she a little paler than she should be?

  Her mind seemed to hold nothing but pleasure in his presence and intentness on the dance. The swift drumming of the estampie had given way to a subtler rhythm. Strange, complex: a clatter of nakers, a beating of drums, a high thin wailing of pipes. Gwydion had left throne and crown to tread the new measure; his image whirled beyond him, gold and scarlet to his white and silver, dizzying to watch: man and mirror, twin and twin, king and royal prince caught up in the rhythm of the dance.

  “They dance for the life of the kingdom,” said Thea.

  Nikki nodded slowly. He could feel the swift pulse of it, strong as the beating of the drums, frail as the wailing of the pipes. They were all in it now save only she. Even Alf, tall sword-slim youth with hair flying silver-fair, reticence and scholarship forgotten, unleashing for this moment his lithe panther’s grace.

  With each movement he drew closer to the center, to the King. The pattern shaped and firmed about him. Wheels wove within wheels. Human bodies, human wills, human minds babbled oblivious; but at the heart of them swelled a mighty magic.

  Here in the White Keep at the turning of the year, under the rule of the Elvenking, his Kindred had raised their power. Power beyond each single flame of witchery, power to shake the earth or to hold it on its course; power to sustain their kingdom against all the forces of the dark.

  Thea tapped Nikki between the shoulders, a slight, imperative push. “Go on. Help them.”

  He hesitated. He—he was not—

  “For me,” she said, fierce-eyed.

  There was a space, a gap, a weakness in the pattern. He let it t
ake him.

  oOo

  A much larger presence took Nikki’s place at Thea’s side. Jehan had left Anna with a crowd of young scholars, all wild and some brilliant, concealing their awe of the royal court behind an air of great ennui. The presence of a bishop, a friend of the Pope himself, had been rather too much for them.

  Thea could remember him as a novice with a pocketful of stolen figs, reading the Almagest in a hayloft. She grinned at him; he grinned back.

  “There’s magic in the air tonight,” he said.

  “Ah, shame! You’ve been here a scarce week and already you’re corrupted. You’ll be singing spells next.”

  “The Mass is quite sufficient for me.”

  “And what is that but the very greatest of enchantments?” She shifted a little, carefully. With no apparent haste he was there, supporting her, easing her awkward weight. His eyes were very, very keen.

  Irritably she pushed him away. “I am not delicate!” she snapped.

  He was not at all perturbed, although she could blast him with a thought. Calmly, boldly, he laid his hands upon her belly. “Not delicate,” he said cheerfully, “but none too comfortable, either. When did it start?”

  A hot denial flared, died. He was human; he had no power; but he had never been a fool.

  She lowered her eyes. “It’s nothing yet. Just a pang here and there.”

  “How long?”

  “Since before dinner.”

  His fingers probed gently, unobtrusively, and with alarming skill. He did not say what she knew as well as he: that one small body was as it should be, but the other was not, the daughter as willful-contrary as her mother.

  “You’ve been shielding,” he said.

  “For my own peace of mind. The longer it takes Alf to start shaking, the better we’ll all be.”

  He shook his head. The humans had fallen one by one out of the dance. It was all of the Kindred, and Nikephoros among them, small and dark and solid but utterly a part of them. The King had left their center; one spun there alone, all the pattern in his long white fingers, all the power singing through him, about him, out of him. If he let go—if he even slipped—all would shatter, pattern and power and the minds of those who shaped both.

  Jehan loosed his breath in a long hiss. “But it’s Gwydion who should be—”

  “The King is King of Rhiyana, mortal and otherwise. That,” said Thea, “is the Master of Broceliande.”

  Jehan understood. “God’s strong right arm!” he muttered. “Our Brother Alf, the master sorcerer of them all.”

  “Exactly. And tonight of all nights, he needs his full power. No troubles; no distractions.”

  “But—” Wisely Jehan set his lips together and began again. “He’s arming the last of your defenses. But I thought they were all in the Wood.”

  “Gwydion won’t neglect the whole of his kingdom. Nor,” she added, “will Alfred. Those two are a perfect pair.”

  He did not smile at her mockery. He was still absorbing what she had told him. “I always knew he was strong. But as strong as that... How did you ever get him to admit it?”

  “We didn’t. He hasn’t. He’s simply doing what he has to do.”

  In fire, in splendor; leaping, whirling, soaring like a falcon, swooping down to strike the earth itself, strike it and hold it and guard it, and drive back all who dared to ride against it.

  Thea’s teeth set. Jehan saw. There was no shielding from those eyes or those hands. She gripped him with strength enough to make him wince. “Don’t—don’t—”

  It was a gasp, but it was loud, startling. The music had stopped. The dancers stood poised, their pattern complete.

  It frayed and shredded. Its center flashed through a rent, like light, like white fire. Jehan fell back before him.

  Thea regarded him without fear, even with amusement. “Dearest fool,” she said, “it’s only childbirth. It happens every day.”

  “Not to you.” He lifted her. He was breathless, his hair wild, his face both flushed and pale; he looked hardly old enough to have fathered a child, let alone to be the prop and center of all Rhiyana’s magic. But his eyes were still too bright to meet. “What I should do to you for your deceit—”

  “It served its purpose, didn’t it?” She let her head rest on his shoulder. “Well, my love, are we going to make a spectacle of ourselves here, or would you prefer a little privacy?”

  For a moment the flush conquered the pallor. He held her close, kissed the smooth parting of her hair, and strode swiftly toward the door.

  5.

  “It’s taking a very long time,” Alun said.

  They had converged on Jehan’s small chamber: Alun, Nikki, Anna. That it was very close to Thea’s childbed, being the chaplain’s cell of the Chancellor’s Tower, had something to do with their presence there, but they seemed to take comfort in the occupant himself.

  None of them had slept much. Alun was owl-eyed but almost fiercely alert, perched at the end of the hard narrow bed. “All night it’s been,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

  Anna looked up from the book that she was trying to read by candlelight. “It often does take a while, especially with first babies. Your mother was two days with you.”

  “Yes, and it almost killed her!” Nikki drew him into a quieting embrace; he pulled free. “We’re not like you. We’re strong in everything except this. It’s so frighteningly hard even to get children, and then we can’t bear properly. As if... we weren’t meant...”

  Jehan grasped his shoulders and held him firmly. “Stop that now. Alf is there, and your mother, and your father. They won’t let anything happen.”

  Alun drew together. Too thin, too pale, too sharp of feature, he had not come yet to the beauty of his kind; he was all eyes and spidery limbs, quivering with tension. “Alf is afraid,” he said.

  To his indignation, Jehan laughed. “Of course Alf’s afraid! I’ve never met a new father who wasn’t. And the more he knows of midwifery, the more terrified he’s apt to be, because he knows every little thing that can go wrong.” The Bishop held out his hands. “Here, children. Let’s sing a Mass for them—and for us, of course, to keep us from gnawing our nails.”

  Alun looked rebellious. Anna frowned. Nikki tilted his head to one side, and after a moment, smiled. Why, he said clearly in all their minds, it’s Epiphany. Twelfth Night. We can ask the Three Kings to help Thea.

  “And the Christ child.” Alun leaped up. “They’ll listen to us, I know it. Come, be quick! We’ve no time to waste.”

  oOo

  The chapel was small but very beautiful, consecrated to Saint John, the Evangelist, the prophet, and incidentally, Jehan’s own name-saint. Long ago, when this had been the Queen’s Tower, this chapel had been hers. Alf had kept the century-old fittings, adding only new vestments and a new altar cloth of his own weaving. For that skill too he had, a rare and wonderful magic, to weave what he saw into a tangible shape. Snow and moonlight for the altar, sunlit gold for the chasuble, both on a weft of silk.

  The children sat close together near the altar, two dark heads and one red-gold; two wide pairs of black eyes, the third fully as wide but grey as rain. Alun, in the middle, held a hand of each of his friends.

  Only he sang the responses; Anna never would and Nikki could not. His voice was almost frightening, high and achingly pure, soaring up and up and up, plunging with no warning at all and with perfect control into a deep contralto. Even in his trouble, or perhaps because of it, he took a quiet delight in that skill, smiling at the man on the altar.

  Of course, Jehan thought; the boy was Alf’s pupil. Small wonder that he could sing like an angel—or like a Jeromite novice. The others were devout enough, but he was rapt. As if there were more to the rite than words and gestures, a depth and a meaning, a center that was all light.

  What a priest he would make!

  Jehan sighed a little even in the Mass. What a priest Alf had made, and he had had to leave it or go mad. And this was a royal prince,
heir by right to a throne, even without the fact of his strangeness. His damnation, the Church would decree. Absolute and irrevocable by his very nature, because he was witchborn; he would not age, he would not die.

  The Church is a very blind thing.

  Nikephoros’ voice, distinct and rather cold.

  While Alun made a rippling beauty of the Agnus Dei, Jehan met the steady black stare. He did not try to answer. Nikki had heard it all, attack and defense, a thousand times over. And being Greek, tolerant of Rome but never bound to it, he could judge more calmly than most.

  Nor am I... quite... human. I was certainly born with a soul; it’s a moot point whether I’ve lost it since.

  Another of Alf’s clever pupils.

  And Thea’s. Nikki’s head bowed; his eyes lowered. His whole body spoke a prayer.

  oOo

  Pain was scarlet and jagged and edged with fire. Pain was something one watched from a very great distance, and even admired for its perfect hideousness. But one did not mock it. Not after so long in its company.

  A most unroyal crew, they were. A slender child in a smock like a serving maid’s, ivory hair escaping from its plait, lovely flower-face drawn thin with weariness. A tall young man with his black brows knit, his shirt of fine linen much rumpled with long labor. And closest of all to heart and body, a youth as tall as the other, still in his cotte of cloth of silver, bending over the focus of the pain: a body naked and swollen, gone to war with itself.

  “It was just so with me,” said the girl, who was no girl at all but a queen. “A battle, Alun’s power against my own. And here are two, stronger still in their minds’ bonding, struggling to keep to the womb.”

  No. Thea had no breath to say it aloud, but her mind had a little strength left. It’s not only that. I’m too small. Fighting myself, too. Alf, if you need to cut—

  He shook his head, stroking her sweat-sodden hair out of her face.

  Anger flared with the pain. Damn you, Alfred! I’m tired.

  “Not too tired to rage at me.”

  And he was taking the pain, setting her apart from it. But she was past repentance. Out! she cried to the center of the struggle. Out with you!