Hounds of God

by Tarr, Judith

  Giacomo snatched once, caught the wrong hood, stared into startled eyes. Female eyes—and male ones beside them, promising murder.

  It took him some little time to extricate himself; when he looked again, Oddone was gone. Half a dozen tonsures bobbed within reach, and half of those above Jeromite habits, but none was Brother Oddone.

  Who, besides his body’s frailty, had been known to faint for no reason at all, once even in the street. But that street had not been so busy or so full of jostling humanity. Nor had it been so far from his monastery; and he had a fine mind and the hand of an artist, but no head at all for directions.

  There was nothing for it but to go forward as Oddone must have gone, and strain eyes and neck in searching for him.

  Pilgrims, monks, matrons, pilgrims, idlers and marketers and beggars, servants, pilgrims. No Oddone. A princeling and his bravos; a lady in a litter; a cardinal in state. Of Oddone, not a sign. And all Rome to be lost in and a piazza before the seeker, with great ways and small radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel.

  The people were not so crowded here. The street had confined them; they had space now to scatter.

  Pilgrims clustered around the statue on one edge, an image out of old Rome: Dionysus in his robe of fawnskin, crowned with vine leaves, with a leopard fawning at his feet. Guides always swore that it was a saint in the arena, taming the beast that would have slain him. One was swearing it now, loudly, in bad Norman. Giacomo could understand enough to be sure of that.

  No Oddone here. These were all hulking towheaded northerners, with a scatter of stragglers on their fringes, hawkers of relics and tokens, beggars, the odd pilgrim. Giacomo skirted them, mounting above them, for they overflowed the space around the image and poured up the steps of the little church called, of course, Saint Bacchus. From the top he might be able to see his way.

  Intent, peering over heads, he collided with an unexpected obstacle. It grunted and said in a familiar tuneless voice, “Prior Giacomo, look. Just look!”

  Giacomo seized him as if to shake him, half for relief, half for white rage. All his anxiety, all his desperation, and Oddone was not even surprised to be found again. He could only gape at an old statue like half a thousand other statues in this city of marble and memories, beautiful maybe, but a beauty grown lusterless with surfeit.

  His narrow face was rapt; his sallow cheeks were flushed. He looked feverish. “Sweet saints,” he breathed. “I have to paint that face.”

  Giacomo sighed gustily. “So paint it. Or any one of its thousand twins.”

  That managed to startle Oddone, but not enough to free his eyes from their bondage. “Twins? Brother Prior, there can be none like it in the world. Only look at it.” Oddone caught Giacomo’s arm with amazing force and turned him bodily. “Look!”

  There was Saint Bacchus with his ringlets tumbling down his marble back, no face to be seen. There was the leopard with its fanged grin. There were the pilgrims, row on row.

  Not all after all were Norman. One stood among them like a child in a field of tall corn, his black curly head bare to the sun, his black eyes sparkling with mockery as the guide rambled on. His face was dark and young and wild, a deal more handsome than not, and as utterly un-Norman as any face could be. Levantine, Giacomo would have said, or Greek.

  Oddone shook his Prior lightly. “Do you see him now? Have you ever seen his like?” And losing patience at last, he pointed. “By all the angels, Brother Prior, are you blind?”

  His finger pointed directly to the right of the dark boy, to one of the tall figures that hemmed him in. That one, Giacomo saw, stood slightly apart, an inch perhaps, or a world’s width.

  From the steps he seemed to stand almost face to face with the statue, a pilgrim clothed like any other, hat and hood, gown, cloak and scrip and staff. But the face he lifted as if to exchange stares with the marble god...

  Giacomo swallowed. No one should have a face like that. White like marble, but living, breathing, tilting over the boy’s head toward one of the brawnier Normans, smiling a very little and murmuring something far too faint to be heard.

  “I have to paint him,” Oddone said. “For my archangel.” He stopped and sucked in his breath. “Brother Prior! Could he—could he really be—”

  “The age of miracles is over.” As soon as he had said it, Giacomo wished that he had not. Not that he had wounded Oddone—the lad was well past it—but that he might after all have lied.

  Oddone looked fair to lose himself again, though this time at least he had a visible destination. Giacomo got a grip on the back of his cincture. He hardly seemed to notice the weight he towed behind him.

  Yet once he had reached his quarry he hung back. Shy, Giacomo thought, then saw his face. It wore the same look as when he stood with brush in hand and model before him, and page or panel waiting for the first stroke.

  The guide had ended his tale and gathered his flock, herding them churchward, hangers-on and all. Only three were not to be moved: the dark youth, the big Norman with his rough sandy beard, and Oddone’s archangel.

  The boy wandered up to the statue, exploring its base with quick light fingers. The Norman, who alone had no hat but only a hood, let it fall back from a tonsured head and said in excellent Latin, “Well, brothers, what now?”

  Neither of his companions responded. The boy ignored him utterly. The other turned his head from side to side as if questing.

  His eyes were enormous, colorless as water. He should have had a bleached look, all white as he was; he should have seemed browless and lashless, naked and unfinished. But his brows were fine and distinct and set on a definite tilt, just touched with gold; his lashes were thick and long; and all his pallor had a sheen like light caught in alabaster. Beside him the marble Dionysus was a dull and lifeless thing.

  The Norman sighed. “I for one,” he said with elaborate patience, “would like to know where my head will rest tonight. And how we’re going to occupy ourselves until we get there.”

  Oddone had found his opening, a sending straight from heaven. “Why, good pilgrims, if that’s your worry, I know just the place.”

  The big man looked down in startlement to the voice that chirped by his elbow. He had a battered soldier’s face, but his eyes were blue as flax flowers. They took in Oddone from crown to toe and back again, not a long journey at all.

  Surprise and suspicion had turned his face to flint; now it softened, and his stare turned quizzical. “Do you, Brother? Where may that be?”

  “Why,” said Oddone quickly, “in our own San Girolamo. We don’t keep a regular hostel, but we have a guesthouse, small but very comfortable, with its own garden. And to a Brother of our own Order and his companions, we can offer a warm welcome.”

  Giacomo gaped in astonishment. Shy Brother Oddone, diffident well-nigh to tears, not only stood up to a man thrice his size; he offered lodgings on behalf of his whole monastery.

  The Norman monk was interested, even a little amused. “Is that San Girolamo near the Palatine? The one with the lovely campanile?”

  “Yes!” cried Oddone, delighted. “Brother, you must come, you and the others. Must they not, Brother Prior?”

  Now at last he was mindful of his own low rank—now all his sins were committed. Giacomo made no effort to smooth his face, although he knew he looked formidable. “Prior Giacomo,” he named himself with the formality of suspicion, “of San Girolamo.”

  “Brother Jehan,” the foreigner responded, “from Anglia.” If Giacomo’s manner daunted him, he gave no sign of it. “For myself, I’d be glad enough to take your Brother’s offer, provided you approve. My companions I can’t speak for.”

  Slowly the strange one turned. His expression was remote, even cold, but his gaze was clear enough. As it flickered over Giacomo, the Prior shivered. It seemed to have substance, a touch like wind, both burning and cool. “I would be content,” he said. His Latin was flawless, his voice as uncanny as his face. “With the Prior’s consent.”

  G
iacomo’s scowl deepened. Oddone was quivering like a pup before its master, uncertain whether he had earned a reward or a whipping. The two tall men waited, the boy coming between them, bright-eyed with curiosity but offering no word.

  At last Giacomo spoke. “Of course I consent. It’s in the Rule. Hospitality to all who come, out of Christ’s charity. Our Abbot won’t argue with that.”

  Oddone clapped his hands. “Come on, then! We’re taking an easy way back; we’re at liberty, you see, and needn’t hurry. Are you hungry? Thirsty? Is there anything you’d like to see?”

  A grin transformed Jehan’s face, stripping away a full score of years. “You choose, Brother. We’re even freer than you—at loose ends, for a fact; we’ll follow wherever you lead.”

  And lead them Oddone did, with skill as amazing as everything he had done since he came to Saint Bacchus, chattering happily with the Norman monk, harkened to with silent interest by the young Greek, and quite undismayed by his strange one’s abstraction.

  Giacomo trailed after the oddly assorted company. After some little time he discovered that he was matching his pace to that of the white stranger.

  The others had drawn somewhat ahead up the remnant of an old paved way, a road like a green tunnel through one of Rome’s many wildernesses. The sun was shut out here; the awareness of humanity, of the city, was dim and distant. Yet Oddone was leading them through the city itself, from the mighty fortress bulk of the Colosseum toward the Palatine Hill and, past that, San Girolamo in the hollow of the hill.

  This was not true wasteland as Rome knew it, vast expanses of open field and tangled copse and malarial marsh strewn as thickly with ruins as a battlefield with bones, but rather a garden gone wild. Through the knotted canes peered a pale blurred face, old god or old Roman set on guard here and long forgotten.

  Within reach of the image, Giacomo’s companion slowed. He took off his hat as if it irked him, and let his hood fall back, shaking out a remarkable quantity of winter-gold hair.

  The gesture struck something in Giacomo, made him conscious that he had been seeing no living man at all, but only an ageless abstract beauty. The beauty had grown no less, yet something, maybe the green solitude, had thawed the ice; the marble angel had become a man, and a very young one at that, a princely youth who looked about him with newborn awareness. His eyes had darkened although they were light still, clear silvery grey, alive and alert and very, very keen.

  They found the crumbling statue, examined it, let it pass in favor of the living face. Bright though they were, the terrible brilliance was gone; they saw no more than any eyes had a right to see.

  Giacomo began to bristle. He was not a marble Roman, to be stared at for so long a count of heartbeats down so elegant a length of nose. Yet for all its pride, it was not an arrogant stare; it had a strange clarity, an innocence that asked no pardon and never dreamed it needed any.

  “Well, sir,” said the Prior as the silence stretched, “do you find my face ugly enough to be fascinating?”

  The pilgrim lowered his eyes. “Your pardon, Brother Prior. I meant no discourtesy.”

  “I suppose I can forgive you. You’re a nobleman at home, aren’t you?”

  He looked almost dismayed. “Is it so obvious?”

  “Rather,” Giacomo said.

  “How strange,” murmured the pilgrim. He walked more slowly still, pondering.

  Giacomo might have thought him mad, or slow in the wits; the former all but certainly, if only instinct had not rebelled. There was something eminently sane about this young man, although it was not the sanity of the common run of mankind. It was in fact very like Oddone’s. Brilliant, narrowly focused, and generally preoccupied.

  His focus shifted abruptly to Giacomo; just as abruptly he said, “I’m called Alfred, or Alf if you like. Like my friend, I come from Anglia.”

  “So,” said Giacomo, “Oddone was almost right. Not an angel after all, but an Angle.”

  Alf smiled a little ruefully “I earned that, didn’t I?” And after a moment: “Your face is not ugly at all, and yet I do find it fascinating.”

  “All Rome in a nose,” Giacomo said, half annoyed, half amused. “You wouldn’t happen to be an artist, too, would you?”

  Alf shook his head with a touch of regret. “I’m but a poor student of the world and its faces. Sometimes, as you’ve discovered, to the point of rudeness.”

  “It’s forgiven,” Giacomo said.

  As they hastened to catch the others, now lost to sight, he realized that all his ill humor had evaporated. Nor could even Oddone’s tuneless singing bring it back.

  “O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,

  cunctarum urbium excellentissima....”

  There was only one reasonable defense. With a better will than he had ever expected to have, he added his own rich basso:

  “Roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,

  albis et virginum liliis candida....”

  New voices joined them, strong trained Norman-accented baritone and sudden, piercingly sweet tenor.

  “Salutem dicimus tibi per omnia,

  te benedicimus—salve per saecula!”

  They made quite a passable choir, Oddone notwithstanding. Even as their singing faded into the clamor of Rome and died, Giacomo discovered that he was smiling.

  13.

  As prisons went, Anna supposed, this one was quite luxurious. It was clean; if not warm, it was certainly not too cold to bear, and she had the blanket; the food was edible though somewhat monotonous. Her hands were healing well; she had taken off the bandages some little time since, reckoned in visits of their unseen jailer. Food appeared at regular intervals; the chamberpot was never full, the lamp never empty.

  It was like a tale out of Anna’s eastern childhood, save that her nurse had never told her how very frightening it was to be waited on by unseen hands, watched over by a guard whom she could not perceive.

  At first it nearly drove her mad not to know who watched, or where, or why. But with time she calmed. Let him watch, whatever he was, wizard or demon or renegade of the Kindred. Let him know all she did, thought, said. She had nothing to be ashamed of.

  She huddled at her end of the pallet, or prowled the cell, or played with the children. Pups she refused to call them, and she was adamant. Yet pups they were. Rather dull at first like all newborn creatures, all their beings focused on food and sleep.

  But as time crawled on, they grew and changed with the swiftness of beastkind. Their eyes learned to see; they learned to walk, an awkward big-bellied waddle that transformed itself into a lolloping run. They found their voices, and they discovered play in all its myriad avatars. Only their eyes betrayed their kind, cat- pupiled blue paling slowly to white-gold, marked now and then with a sudden uncanny clarity.

  Thea, chained, was nurse and refuge, her temper held at bay for their sakes. Anna was friend, playmate, even teacher.

  For she talked to them. She talked constantly, and the invisible one be damned. She told them of their father and their kin and their inheritance of power; of Rhiyana and Broceliande and the great world; of magic and the Church, orthodoxy and heresy, philosophy and theology and all the high learning her imprisonment denied her.

  “Boredom,” she would say while Liahan dueled with a wickedly snarling Cynan for possession of her lap. “That is the curse of the prisoner. Stale air, stale light, unremitting confinement—what are they to the mind that has work to do? Nothing at all! But put it in a cell without book or pen or parchment; without conversation, without games, with nothing to do but count cracks in the stone, pull straws out of the pallet, dispute with imaginary philosophers, and invent progressively less inventive fantasies; and directly it rots away. If I didn’t have you imps to chase after, I believe I’d barter my soul for one glimpse of a book. Or,” she added with deep feeling, “a bath.”

  For that was worst of all, worse even than the long bookless hours, to be so dismayingly unkempt, cleaned sketchily and stickily with wine and the edge of her
camise, gaining nothing for her efforts but a steadily more draggled hem. At least her courses had not begun, which belied the eternity she seemed to have been here; she refused to consider what would happen when they did.

  She was still dreaming of rescues. All the Fair Folk in a storm of fire. Father Jehan in white armor with a cross on his breast. Alf walking calmly in and bidding them be free.

  She shut her eyes tight, the better to see his face. He was smiling. His body gleamed softly as sometimes it did at night, as if his skin had caught and held the moon. His eyes were red like coals, like rubies, rimmed with silver fire; about his head shone a white nimbus of power.

  She sighed and shifted, and groaned a little. Her neck was stiff. Unwillingly she opened her eyes.

  He was there. Living, breathing, shining pale, all in white and grey silver, looking down. Her whole being gathered to leap into his arms.

  Knotted. Cramped. Recoiled.

  It was Alf. It was not.

  Tall, pale, yes. Beautiful, ah yes, more beautiful than anyone had a right to be and still be unmistakably a man.

  But not Alf. The face was the merest shade broader. The hair was merely gilt, with no glimmer of silver. The eyes were a hard clear grey like flint. And on the lean young cheek was a distinct shadow of beard.

  She tried to swallow. Her mouth was burning dry.

  This not-Alf, this creature as like to him as a brother, was Brother indeed, severely tonsured, habited—impossibly, terribly—in grey over white. A Pauline monk, looking not at her at all but at the hound who lay silent at her feet.

  Thea was awake, frozen, every hair erect. From beneath her burst her son, hurtling upon the stranger with an infant roar.

  The monk’s eyes flickered. Anna’s own hackles rose as at the passing of lightning. Cynan ran full into a wall no one could see, tumbling end over end yet snarling still with irrepressible fury.

  His mother’s forefoot pinned him; he struggled wildly beneath it. Thea’s voice rang in Anna’s mind. Demon. Coward. Judas. Bind me, beat me, compass me in the mind of a hound—whatever betrayal you hunt for, you’ll never get it from me.