Hounds of God

by Tarr, Judith

  And he too was gone, still muttering to himself, leaving Giacomo alone with the altar and the crucifix and the glittering angels. “Is it the world that’s mad,” he demanded of them, “or is it simply I?”

  They offered no answer. He stiffened his back and throttled his bafflement and spun on his heel, setting off after the others. However far behind they had left his wits, his body at least could follow where they led.

  16.

  “This is getting us nowhere.”

  Jehan stalked from end to end of the room they all shared in the guesthouse. They had it to themselves; it was spacious, the walls painted with faded vistas, a brazier set in the center of it to ward off winter’s chill.

  Nikki sat crosslegged on the bed Jehan shared with Alf, mending a rent in his mantle. Alf sat on a stool near the brazier, turning the pages of a book he had found in the library. Both had glanced up as Jehan spoke, a flash of black and one of silver.

  He stopped just short of a peeling pomegranate tree and spun about. “A full month we’ve been here. In a little while it will be Lent. And what do we have to show for it? One copy of Silvestris’ Cosmographia. Two pairs of blistered feet.”

  “Fifteen pages of the Gospels in a slightly antiquated hand.” Alf’s irony was not clearly perceptible. He closed the book and let it lie in his lap, regarding Jehan with a cool and steady stare.

  The Bishop of Sarum raked his fingers through his beard. Since its sudden, uncanny, and fiercely itching birth, it had done well enough by itself, though he doubted that after all it was much of a disguise. That he had seen few familiar faces in all his daily travels, and that none of those had hailed him by name, was probably due more to Heaven’s good grace than to any deception of his own.

  “I know you’re doing all you can,” he said to both the waiting gazes, “or at least, all you can think of. But it’s not working.”

  Nikki nodded. It was not. His mind was as sore as his feet, and he had not found a trace of the enemy, let alone of the ones he searched for. He had not even come across a memory of any of them, a hint in a human brain that their quarry existed. Rome was large and sprawling, full of ruins and of churches, with people crowded together round the foci of the river, the Pope’s palace in the Lateran, the Leonine City beyond Sant’Angelo. But no Anna, no Thea, no children; no mad and mighty power.

  “And Rhiyana isn’t holding still for us,” Jehan said. “The Cardinal’s investigation grinds as inexorably as the mills of God, but a great deal faster. The King’s gone to the Marches; the raiding’s begun, and men have been seen wearing the Cross and crying death to the Witch-king.”

  Nikki took up the litany. The Heresiarch in Caer Gwent has been taken by the priests. The Greeks and the Saracens are finding urgent business at home. A Jewish child has been found dead outside of one of the churches in the city. His eyes glittered; he flung down his mended cloak. There must be something else we can do!

  “We can go to the Pope,” said Jehan. “I know how to reach him. We were friends before his elevation; he consecrated me himself. He won’t keep us waiting for an audience.”

  I should like to see the Pope, Nikki said.

  “We should have gone to him as soon as we came. This is an excellent monastery, and by a miracle there’s no one in it who knows me, but we’re not finding anything by staying here.”

  Alf’s eyes had followed the debate but had lost none of their coolness. His voice was cooler still, almost cold. “We’ve barely begun to hunt. Would you start the deer before you’ve even taken the bow out of its case? That’s what you’ll do if you go to the Pope now. Friend or no, he’s in the Hounds’ power; he’ll certainly be watched by our enemy. If he learns of us and our troubles, even if he’s disposed to be lenient, we’ll lose our kin in truth; for the enemy will never relax his vigilance.”

  Where I go, Nikki pointed out, no one with power can follow. What if he is on guard every instant? He’ll never know I’m there to guard against.

  “Nikki can shield His Holiness,” Jehan said, “just as he’s shielding us now. The enemy need never know—and the Pope may well know where the Hounds have their kennels.”

  Alf shook his head once. “He won’t know of this one. And if the enemy is on guard, invisibility is no use; a wall is impenetrable whether or not the invader can be seen. He has to be at ease, to think us all shut behind our own safe walls in Rhiyana. Then maybe he’ll let slip the bolts on the postern gate.”

  “He hasn’t done it yet.”

  “He hasn’t had time.”

  “God’s bones! It’s been a month. Wars have been won and lost in far less time than that.”

  “This war is still in its infancy.”

  Jehan’s hands knotted into fists; he loomed over Alf, who merely looked up at him, unmoved. “Thirty days ago—even seven days ago—I’d have said you were keeping up your courage by seeming not to care. But there’s a limit to that kind of courage. I think you’ve passed it.” Alf stirred by not a hair’s breadth. “Oh, you still care whether your family lives or dies. That’s a torment in the heart of you. You don’t care to hunt any more. You’ve given up. You’ve surrendered. You’ve let the enemy have his victory.”

  “You have not been listening,” Alf said with icy precision. “For the third time, we have only begun to—”

  “We haven’t! We’ve failed in the first sally. We have no new tactics. And you won’t exert that famous brain of yours to find any.”

  “We need none. We have only to hunt; to keep our minds open and invisible; and to wait.”

  “Nikki hunts. Nikki keeps us invisible. You do nothing but wait.”

  Alf rose. He had never had much flesh to spare, and that was very nearly gone. Yet to Nikki’s eyes he seemed not more frail but less, like a blade of steel. “That,” he said, “is known as wisdom.”

  I call it passivity. I don’t mind your cloistering yourself here; you’ve never been skilled at walking in a trance. But you can’t lie back and trust to fate. Time doesn’t wait. War won’t hold off till your opening presents itself to you. And, Nikki added grimly, while we stumble about in the dark, God alone knows what that madman is doing to his captives.

  “They’re alive,” Alf said in a flat voice.

  “You hope.” Jehan struggled to master his temper, to speak reasonably. “Alf, we can’t continue the way we’ve been going, following our noses and hoping we catch wind of something useful. We need to try another tack. Not the Pope, if you insist, but there must be some other way to bring this quarry to earth. Can’t you help us find it?”

  “There is no need.”

  “Alf—”

  And the silent voice: Alf, for the love of Heaven—

  He cut them both off. “If you are tired of this seeming futility, you need not pursue it. I can hunt alone. My lord Bishop, you have but to say the word and I can transport you wherever you will, even to your own see of Sarum. Nikephoros, the King will be glad of your aid in the war; or you may serve the Queen or defend the Wood. No compulsion holds you here.”

  They stared at him, speechless. He sounded like a stranger; he looked like one.

  Yes, Nikki thought. Ever since Thea vanished with the children she had borne him, he had been changing. His body had passed from thin to gaunt; his mind had retreated, turning inward upon itself. Above the hollowed cheeks his eyes were pale, remote; not hostile, indeed not unfriendly, but not at all the eyes of the one who had loved them both as brothers.

  “You may go,” he said to them, “without guilt. I’ll be well enough here.”

  They glanced at one another. Jehan’s eyes were a little wild. Nikki supposed his own were the same.

  He knew he wanted to hit something, but Alf was not a wise target. Even in this new mood of his, he was still one of the Kindred, with strength and swiftness far more of the beast than of the human.

  Nikki watched Jehan’s mind turn over alternatives. It was a very pleasant mind to watch, quick and clear, honest yet subtle, able at will to
relinquish control to the trained fighter’s body. That body urged him to knock Alf unconscious, to hope that such a blow would return him to his proper senses.

  But the mind, wiser, held it back. Considered logic, persuasion, pleading, anger. Settled at last. Unclenched the heavy fists; drew a deep sigh. “Don’t be an idiot,” Jehan said with weary annoyance. “I got myself into this; I’ll see it through to its end. With your help or without it.”

  Alf did not say what he could have said of Jehan’s efficacy as a hunter of shadows. That was mercy enough for the moment. He returned to his seat and opened the book again.

  Jehan drew back, stood briefly silent, turned away.

  Without him the room seemed much larger yet somehow more confining. Alf was losing himself, quite deliberately one might have thought, in the mysteries of the world’s creation. In his drab pilgrim’s robe he seemed much more a monk than the man he had just put to flight.

  Nikki could stand it no better than Jehan had. He sought the same refuge with somewhat more haste.

  oOo

  The sun was still high. He blinked in the light of it, faintly shocked. He had half expected the sky to be as grim as his mood, not blue as the Middle Sea with here and there a fleece of cloud. The air was as warm as Rhiyanan spring; grass grew green around the grey walls, sprinkled with small white flowers like a new fall of snow.

  For an instant his yearning for Rhiyana was as strong as pain. But that passed; he drew a careful breath, finding to his surprise that his eyes had blurred. Was he as tired as that?

  He shook himself. It was not only the endless futility of the search, and not even the bitterness of the quarrel. He was not made to shut himself up in the walls of an abbey.

  Father Jehan had a talent: wherever he found himself, there for the moment was his element. Alf was abbey-bred, more visibly so with each day he spent in San Girolamo. But Nikephoros Akestas was completely a creature of the world. Bells and candles and chanting and incense forged each the links of a chain; they dragged at him, they sapped his strength.

  He found that he was walking very fast, almost running. It was not fear; it was the swiftness of the hawk cut loose from its jesses. No one was pursuing him. No one was setting him to hunt or do squire service or pretend to pray. He was free.

  He laughed and danced, stalked a cloud shadow down the empty street, put to flight a flock of sparrows. But then, contrite, he called them all back again, making amends with a bit of bread he found in his scrip.

  When the Via di San Girolamo had given way to the broader, brighter, and far busier stretch of the Corso, Nikki had relegated all his ill humor to oblivion. He let his feet carry him where they would, and let his eyes for once take in the wonders of this strange half-ruined half-thriving city.

  Some of it was new, and raw with it, a bristle of armed towers, a crowding of churches and houses and palaces. Most of it was ancient, much of that built anew with the brick and marble of old Rome, some even built into the ancient monuments, people nesting like birds in the caverns of giants.

  Yet just such people, Alf said, had raised those very monuments. Small dark keen-faced men and women who reeked of olive oil and garlic, who chattered incessantly and burst into song at will, and seemed to live and love and fight and even die in the streets outside their patchwork houses.

  Nikki, wandering among them, felt as always a little odd. In Rhiyana he had been branded a foreigner from the first for his small stature, his dark skin, his big-eyed Byzantine face. In Rome he was completely unremarkable.

  Why, he thought with a shiver of amazement, he was not even particularly small. In fact, judging from the people he passed and the ones he knew in San Girolamo, he was somewhat above the middle height. It was distinctly pleasant to find himself looking over the heads of grown men.

  He bought a hot and savory pie from a vendor and sat on a step to eat it. The stair was attached to a very Roman house, a sprawling affair with a faÁade of ancient columns, no two alike, and under and behind them an odd mixture of shops. The one nearest appeared to be a purveyor of ink and parchment and a book or two; the next was patently a wineshop.

  The pie was wonderful, eel well spiced with onion and precious pepper. As he nibbled at it, he gained a companion, a handsome particolored cat that wove about his ankles, beseeching him with feline politeness to share his pleasure. In return she offered him her own sleek presence, curling in his lap and purring thunderously.

  That was a fair bargain, he agreed, dividing the remains of the pasty. If it surprised his new companion to be addressed so clearly by a mortal man, she was far too much a cat to show it; she merely accepted her purchase and consumed it with dispatch. And having done so, washed with care while he licked his own fingers clean.

  What made him look up, he never knew. His senses were drawn in upon himself and his contented belly and his sudden friend; his only further thought had been for a cup of wine to wash down the eel pie. As he raised his eyes, even that small bit of sense fled him utterly.

  He was used to beauty. Sated with it, maybe. He had grown up with the Fair Folk; nor were the mortal women of Rhiyana far behind when all was considered. He had seen nothing in Rome to compare with either.

  The girl on the step below him was not outstandingly beautiful. She had lovely hair, even in a braid and under a veil. Her face was pleasing, fine-featured, with eyes the deep and dreaming blue of the sky at evening. She was very pretty; she was nothing beside Thea or the Queen, or almond-eyed Tao-Lin with her flawless gold-white skin.

  And yet she stunned him where he sat. It was not the quantity of her beauty; it was the quality.

  The way she stood, the way she tilted her chin, the way she looked at him under her strong dark brows, all struck with him with their exact and perfect rightness. Not too bold, not too demure; clear and level and keenly intelligent.

  He rose with the cat in his arms. It seemed eminently natural to set the beast down with a courteous pat, to straighten, to relieve the girl of several of her awkward bundles and packages.

  She did not resist him, though she frowned slightly. He was, after all, a complete stranger. But he smiled and bowed with a flourish, burdens and all; she melted. “You’re very kind, sir,” she said.

  He shook his head a little, but smiling still, stepping back to let her pass. She paused to greet the cat, which in its feline fashion was pleased to see her; her eyes danced aside to meet Nikki’s. Well, and he was a stranger, but already a friend to Arlecchina; a man could have a worse patron.

  She led him up the stair. Her back was straight, the braid of her hair swinging thick and long and lovely below the edge of her veil, just where he would have liked to set his hand.

  He stopped almost gratefully as she set her hand to an iron-bound door. It was latched but not bolted; it opened with ease on a small ill-lit passage redolent of garlic, age, and cats. She turned there, meaning to thank him kindly and send him away.

  This time he did not smile. He knew what everyone said about his eyes; he wielded them shamelessly.

  She stiffened against them.

  Her thoughts were transparent. For all her unchaperoned solitude, she was neither a whore nor a serving girl, to play the coquette with a stranger, a pilgrim from who knew where. No doubt with that face he had encountered many such, charmed them and taken them and left them; and she all alone, with the neighbors at their work and her uncle at his, and old Bianca deaf as a post and bedbound with the ague, which was why she had gone to market alone to begin with. Which, in purest honesty, was why she had gone at all.

  She had wanted to go out by herself, to do as she pleased with no eyes to watch and disapprove. The consequence tightened his grip on her purchases and raised his brows.

  Madonna, he said in his clearest mind-voice, I know what you’re thinking. I assure you by any saint you care to name that I have no designs on your virtue. If you will let me bear your burdens the rest of the way, I promise that I won’t even assault you with a longing look.
r />   His eyes held her; she did not see that his lips never moved. To her ears his voice was a perfectly ordinary young man’s voice, speaking in the Roman dialect. She smiled at the words, hardly knowing that she did, or that her eyes had begun to sparkle.

  Her voice made a valiant effort to be stern. “Sir, you are kind, but I can manage. It’s only a little way, and the servant is waiting for me.”

  Nikki smiled. My name is Nikephoros. I’m a pilgrim, as you can see; I lodge with the monks in San Girolamo down in the Velabro. I’ve never yet seduced a virgin, let alone raped one; I doubt I’ll begin today. My looks are against me, I know, but can’t you find it in your heart to trust me? Even a little?

  The sparkle was very clear now to see and even to hear. “You talk exactly the way I was told a young man would before he began his seduction. As for your looks...” Her cheeks flushed; she bit her lip and went on a little too quickly, “My name is Stefania. Yours is rather unusual. Are you Greek?”

  He nodded.

  “Then why,” she demanded with sudden steel, “are you a pilgrim to Rome of all unlikely places?”

  May not even a schismatic Byzantine look on the City of Peter? However regrettable, he added dryly, may be the delusions of its Bishop.

  The blade was not so easily returned to its sheath. “Your accent is not Greek.”

  I grew up in Rhiyana. My teacher was, and is, an Anglian.

  “Now that,” she said, “is preposterous enough to be true. Say something to me in Norman.”

  Nikki choked. Even he could not tell whether it was laughter or horror. He knew Norman, bastard dialect of the langue d’oeil that it was; he could read and write it. He also knew a little Saxon. He did not know if he had an accent in either, since he had never spoken a word in any mortal tongue.

  She was frowning again. He swallowed and tried his best. Fair lady without mercy, is it thus you try all who come to your door?

  “Only strangers who chase me through it.” She softened just visibly, though not with repentance. “Have pity on me, sir. Here you are, a young man, which is danger enough; born a Greek, schismatic and noted for craftiness—which I should know, being half a Greek myself; raised by one of a race of conquerors in a country of enchanters. Can you wonder that I test you?”