Hounds of God

by Tarr, Judith

  The little witch blinked. Anna reeled with sudden dizziness. Those eyes—

  Liahan! Thea’s will cut like a sword, severing the spell.

  Yes, Liahan was laughing even now, though chastened, reaching to lick Anna’s cheek, begging to be set down. Once freed, she set to nursing as if she had never been more than she seemed, a very small and very hungry gazehound pup.

  Witch, Thea said, half in exasperation, half in pride. Born and bred contrary, and determined to stay that way. I almost pity our poor enemy.

  “Pity that?” cried Anna.

  That, Thea agreed. She began to bathe her son, who, sated, lay on the verge of sleep. Anna watched in silence that stretched into peace.

  The air’s singing shattered it. Anna watched the bowls and cups appear. It was no less uncanny for that now she knew how they had come, and by whose will.

  One would think… Thea mused. She shook herself. No.

  “What?” Anna snapped the word viciously.

  Thea lowered her head to her paws, reflecting. Simon the Magus is a coincidence. Of course a man of the Folk, if he were tall and light-eyed and flaxen fair, would look uncannily like Alfred. It’s the cast of the face—it’s the same in all of us. But that he should be so very like, and be so bitterly our enemy…that must be God’s black humor.

  “He’s not quite…right, is he?”

  One could not deceive Thea with an air of indifference. Not that it mattered. Thea had never weakened anyone’s will with a show of compassion. He’s utterly mad. He’s a travesty; a caricature. A nightmare of a might-have-been.

  “He makes me think of Nikki, too. Somehow. In the way he’s twisted; in the way he seems to be missing something. I remember how my mother used to talk, once in a great while, when she didn’t know I could hear. Before Alf came and changed everything. She’d been told to raise my brother like a colt or a puppy, because that was as close to a man as he’d ever get; she could train him, maybe, and she did housebreak him and teach him to eat decently. But he’d never be properly human.”

  He would never have been like yonder creature.

  “How do you know?” Anna flared at her. “How can you imagine what he would have grown into? You know what a mind he has. Alf set it free. What if Alf had never come? Maybe we all would have died when the City fell. That would have been a mercy. But if we hadn’t, if Nikki had grown up, trapped, treated the way people never could help but treat him—all that wit and all that wildness with no way out of his head and no way in…”

  I can imagine it. Thea’s inner voice was so flat that Anna stopped short. Remembered, and felt the heat rise to burn her cheeks. Her tongue had run away again. Would she never learn?

  Thea was choosing not to take offense. Nikephoros would not have let himself sink into a madman. No more than Alf did. He’d have raged; he’d have fought. He would have tried to make something of himself.

  “Sometimes I think, if you ever got tired of Alf, you’d have Nikki in your bed before the hour was out.” No. Anna would never learn.

  An hour? Thea laughed. That long? Anna Chrysolora, you credit me with altogether too much restraint.

  “So that’s why you won’t marry my elder brother. You’ve got your eye on the younger.”

  Of course. Would I be myself if I didn’t?

  In spite of all her troubles and her festering temper, Anna began to laugh. Thea had the eye and the tongue of a notorious harlot, but for all of that, her heart was as fixed and immovable as the roots of Broceliande. She could look, she could laugh, she could tease; she could no more turn from her dozen years’ lover than she could make herself a mortal woman.

  Not, she agreed, at the moment. There’s a significant lack of opportunity here. As for Brother Magus… Have you ever suspected how very little I like smooth-skinned fair-haired boys? I’m one for a fine black eye and a warm brown skin and plenty of curly beard to play with.

  “Nikki doesn’t have enough to—”

  He will when he’s a little older. No, Anna; I despise a pale man. You can imagine how shocked I was when I discovered that I’d fallen in love with the palest of all pale men. All he had to commend him was a good breadth of shoulder—which he was always managing to hide—and a certain indefinable air. This fetch of his obviously has neither.

  “How can you tell under the habit?”

  Thea’s eyes sparkled wickedly. How could I tell under Alf’s? Sometimes I forget you never knew him when he was Brother Alfred. He was the loveliest boy who ever put on a cowl, the meekest white lamb who ever lay down before an altar. A more perfect monk never graced an abbey. But now and then when he was most off guard, I could catch it. A look, a word, a hint of something else. And there were always those shoulders; not to mention another attribute or two, once I got the habit off him.

  If Brother Simon was listening indeed, this was surely driving him wild. Anna inspected the food that Simon’s power had left, found it much the same as ever. She brought the meat to Thea, settling herself with the rest. Between bites she said sagely, “Oh, yes. Those attributes.”

  Thea nibbled the edge of her portion, her eyes bright, amused. I admit, though I was expecting more than a weedy boy, that first good look… I was a hound at the time; he was bathing, and he didn’t even know I was there. Saints and angels! What a lovely moment that was! Then he saw me, or more likely heard me panting, and he didn’t do anything I’d expected, except blush in the most fascinating places. He just kept on washing, ignoring me steadfastly and not saying a word. Not hurrying to hide anything, either. That was when I knew I had to have him. White skin, white hair, and all. She sighed, letting the meat fall back into its bowl. My poor love. Left all alone, and Alun gone who might as well have been another son… Damn these devils of monks!

  15.

  It was very quiet in San Girolamo. Strangely, when Alf stopped to think; Jeromite monks kept no constant vows of silence, and Rome lay outside with its bells and its clamor. But the walls were high and thick, the monastery itself set somewhat apart in the hollow of the hill. From its tower one could see the loom of the Palatine with its white ruins; the city sprawling and crowding down to the river; the bulk of the fallen Circus and the green waste within, and at its far curved end the battlements of a castle.

  But within the abbey’s walls one might have been in a separate country, a kingdom of quiet. In a round of days marked off by the ringing of bells, the monks went about their business, soft on sandaled feet.

  Not that they shuffled and whispered. They spoke and laughed freely enough; the novices had their moments of boisterousness, and the Offices were well and heartily sung. Yet no amount of human uproar seemed able to shake the calm of the ancient stones.

  It was sinking into his bones. He had entered it with deep misgivings, even with fear; castigating himself for a fool—he had grown up in just such a place and guested in many since, both as a pilgrim and as a lord of Rhiyana—but trembling still, because he had left Saint Ruan’s far behind but never quite lost the yearning for it.

  Yet how easy after all to walk through the gate, to exchange courtesies with the gentle aging Abbot, to settle into the guesthouse that was all Oddone had promised and more. How simple after attending Mass as courtesy demanded, also to take part in the Offices, even those of midnight and of dawn, for the bells were insistent and sleep had become a stranger. And if he was there, he could not but join in the prayers and the singing, stumbling a little at first but waking soon to memory.

  Within a day or two, he never knew exactly how, he found that he was no longer relegated to the outer reaches of the chapel with the guests and the pilgrims and the Roman matrons in their black veils; he had a place in the choir between Jehan and Brother Oddone, with Prior Giacomo in his stall behind.

  With the same invisible ease, he found himself in the refectory with the Brothers, partaking of the common fare. Jehan, bishop though he was, was claiming to be but a lowly monk; he could not in good conscience dine thrice daily at the Abbot’s tab
le. Nor would his companions partake of fine meats and wine while he dined on black bread and refectory ale; they joined him among the monks, taking their frugal meals in silence to the sound of the reader’s voice.

  oOo

  “You fit with us well,” said Prior Giacomo.

  After days of rain, the sun had returned at last. In celebration, Oddone had haled Alf off to a corner of the cloister, set him down, and begun to sketch him under the Prior’s interested eye.

  “Just a short time you’ve been here,” Giacomo went on, “and you’ve made yourself one of us.”

  At Oddone’s bidding, Alf raised his chin a little. A vagrant breeze played with his hair. Although he had gone to Brother Tonsore to have it cut, commanded the man to have no mercy, he had lost a scarce inch. It was too handsome, the barber had told him with fine Italian logic, and he was no monk, to have to go about looking like one.

  With that in his memory and a faint wry smile touching his lips, he said, “I try to be a good guest.”

  “By now,” said Giacomo, “you’re hardly one at all. Brother Marco tells me you’ve been putting in a good day’s work in the scriptorium.”

  “He seemed to have need of another hand.” And it made the days easier. Nikki did his hunting in body as well as in mind, roaming the ways of the city with Jehan at heel like a watchful mastiff. Alf could not search so. He stumbled; he groped like a blind man; he forgot to move at all.

  But in the scriptorium in the scents of ink and dust and parchment, where the only sound was the scratching of pens and the occasional turning of a page, his body could look after itself. The words flowed from eye to hand to parchment; the lines stretched out behind, letter after swift meticulous letter; and his mind ran free, hunting the coverts of its own strange world.

  Prior Giacomo sat on a stone bench, taking care not to intrude on Oddone’s light. For all his brusque air, he was a pleasant presence, a gleam of friendship.

  Alf let it ease him. His mind was still a raw wound; the sun though winter-pale was strong, his shields against it unsteady.

  Once long ago, when after a bitter quarrel Thea had left him and closed her mind to him, he had let the sun work its will. It had burned him terribly for his foolishness. And he had not even been her lover then, only her friend and her fellow pilgrim.

  Although this was not the awful glare of August on the shores of the Bosporus, yet it was potent enough to touch such a creature as he. It pressed down upon his head, deceptively gentle. Shielded, he could meet its glare, his eyes—night-eyes, cat-eyes—unwinking. Unshielded—

  Light stabbed him to the soul. His shields leaped up and locked, a reflex as sure as his eyes’ flinching. Even so brief an instant had nearly destroyed them; he could feel the tightness of his skin, the beginnings of pain.

  To the monk and the Prior it was only sunlight, cool and frail. So must he be to his enemy, feeble, powerless, unworthy of notice.

  The Prior was watching him; he saw himself reflected in the dark eyes. Other faces, however flawed, at least were honest, the parade of emotions all open and clear to see. His own was like a mask, white, perfect, serene. For a fiery instant he hated it.

  Giacomo was speaking again. He forced himself to make sense of the words. This was not Caer Gwent, where the strange moods of the Kindred were known and accepted. But the man was speaking in the Roman dialect, the old Latin tongue blurred and softened into foreignness, and Alf could not make his wandering brain remember its ways. He could barely even remember the pure and ordered Latin of the schools.

  He must have risen. He did not know if he spoke. The sun and the cloister were gone; the cool shade had him, the old, old refuge, the chapel walls.

  These were strange and gaudy with their glittering mosaics, but the altar was still the altar, the Christ dying still upon his familiar cross. A man dying for men; what cared he for the anguish of the one who knelt before him? Anguish born of mortal sin: sorcery, fornication, abandonment of the vows that had made him a priest forever.

  Yes. Mortal, in all its senses. All his being howled in pain, but not the smallest speck of it knew any repentance.

  He was not human, to subject himself to human doctrines of sin and salvation. Sorcery he was born to; it was his nature, as much a part of him as his eyes or his hands. Fornication he might atone for if he had ever found any foulness in it, if it had ever brought him aught but joy. For his vows’ forsaking he had the Pope’s own dispensation, signed and sealed and laid away in a coffer in the House of the Falcon.

  So facilely did a scholar dispose of his sins. He sank back on his heels and lowered his face into his hands. Darkness was no refuge. It deepened, broadened, gaped to swallow him. Not his own death but Alun’s. Not his body’s destruction but the shattering of his mind.

  He could not find Thea or his son or his daughter. For all his power knew of them, they might never have existed at all. He could not even sense their nearness—not even the nearness of the power that had taken them.

  His fingers tensed, clawing. He could not see. He could not see. All prophecy was gone from him. There was only the cavernous dark.

  He thrust against it, striking it, striving to tear it; raging, half mad and knowing it and caring not at all.

  He flailed at air and shadow. It yielded, ungraspable yet deadly as the mists of Rome with their burden of fever. His mind reeled, toppled, fell.

  Voices babbled. Light flickered. He shrank away.

  Meaning crept through his barriers. “Signore. Signor’Alfred. Please, are you sick? Signore!”

  Another voice, deeper and rougher, cut across the first. “He’s taken a fit, I think. Go fetch Brother Rafaele. I’ll look after him.”

  Alf struggled, snatching at a retreating shadow, pulling it up short. The shadow gained substance. Brother Oddone gaped down at him, for once far taller; he was lying on the stone, its cold creeping through his heavy robe, and in his hand in a death grip, the hem of the boy’s habit. “No,” he tried to say. “I’m not—”

  Oddone’s incomprehension stopped him. His eyes began to blur again. He willed them to be clear, and his mind with them. He had been speaking no tongue a Roman would understand, the Saxon of his childhood.

  He dared not trust his wits with Italian. He groped for Latin words, found them at last. “Please, Brother. Don’t trouble Brother Rafaele.”

  The hands on him were Prior Giacomo’s, holding him down though when he tried to sit up they shifted to aid him. “We’ll trouble the good Brother, sir, and no arguments. Whatever it is that knocked you down, it hasn’t let you go yet.”

  Alf pulled free, not gently, staggering to his feet. For no reason at all, he was whitely angry. “Have you no ears? I do not wish to be carried off to your infirmary!”

  “So carry yourself,” Giacomo said sharply, meeting glare with glare and temper with temper. “If you’re not sick, Rafaele will say so. If you are, he’ll know what to do about it.”

  “Leeches. Purges. Ignorant nonsense.”

  “If you know so much better, what were you doing in convulsions on the chapel floor?”

  Alf’s body snapped painfully erect. Rage tore through it. Blind babbler, mortal fool; how dared he—

  Convulsions?

  Giacomo had him by the arm. That was ignorance in the man, to be so utterly fearless. Yet he was walking obediently, strength and power and skill in combat forgotten, lost like all the rest of his proper self.

  He willed his feet to be still, his frame to stiffen in resistance, his voice to speak levelly. “There is nothing any physician can do for me. I know. I have been one.” The Prior scowled. For the second time Alf freed himself, but smoothly now, his temper mastered. “Your concern does you credit, Brother Prior, but my illness can have no earthly remedy. It’s past for the moment; let it be.”

  Giacomo might have burst out in bitter words. But Oddone, thrust aside and all but forgotten, leaped eagerly into the gap. “Is it so, signore? Is that why you came here? For a miracle, to cure it?�
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  Alf turned, mildly startled. As always, Oddone’s thin nondescript face warmed something in him; almost he smiled. “Yes. Yes, that’s why I came to Rome.”

  “I’ll pray,” Oddone said. “I’ll pray as hard as I can. God will listen.”

  The smile won free. Alf touched the narrow shoulder lightly.

  Darkness howled. He staggered.

  Giacomo caught fire with vindication; Alf fled his hands. For a moment he had seen, his power whole and keen and terrible, potent enough to set him reeling.

  But there was no joy in that sudden glorious release. Even for a man, born only to die, Oddone was frail. Death sat like a black bird on his shoulder. Its servants prowled his body, haunting the lungs, the laboring heart, the innocent brilliant brain.

  They had had a long lodging in him, from weak and struggling infant to sickly child to fragile dauntless man. In a little while they would conquer him.

  Alf shook his head, tossing it. His face was fixed, frightening, but Oddone did not know how to be afraid. The brown eyes were wide and trusting, troubled for him, thinking he was perhaps in pain.

  Death would abandon no mortal creature, not even at the command of elvenkind. Death’s servants had no such strength. Alf called on all the singing splendor of his power.

  And it came. Limping a little, wounded, yet it came.

  Oddone blinked. Alf unclamped his hand from the monk’s shoulder. “Good day, Brother,” he said. “Pray for me.” He bowed to the Prior, genuflected to the altar, and left them all.

  “How strange,” Oddone murmured. “How very strange.”

  Giacomo would have liked to spit. He satisfied himself with a snarl. “Strange? The man’s an utter lunatic!”

  The other had not even heard him. “I feel warm. Especially where he touched me. He’s amazingly strong; did you notice?” He shook himself slightly. “I have to get back to my drawing. The look he had when he touched me—if I can manage—a line or two, I think; a touch of light, color—”