by Tarr, Judith
The monk laughed softly. “He led me to a power I hardly dared dream of. Imagine my thoughts when a vagabond stumbled into the abbey where I lodged, hardly a fortnight past my acceptance into my new Order; and that wandering madman was obviously, unmistakably an enchanter. A young one with no will at all of his own. He thought I was God. He thinks so still, nor can he be shaken.”
“You were a contemptible boy. You’ve become an evil man.”
He regarded her as she stood there with defiance on her face, holding to Alf as if she would be both protector and protected. “You could argue that I’m the instrument of God’s will. Simon does so incessantly. I’m content to do as I please. In the end, who knows? Saint Peter’s throne may be beyond me, but the generalship of Saint Paul’s brethren is not.”
“Unless,” Alf said gently, “yon beast of burden flings you from his back.”
“Was I ever averse to a good gamble?”
“Your luck, as I recall, was never remarkably good. The meek little monk you caught for your sport turned vicious and brought about your downfall.”
“But now I have him again, and I don’t intend to let him go. You made my fortune before, in your crooked way. You’ll do so again.” Brother Paul raised the hand with which he had been petting Liahan. “Simon. Take him.”
On guard though Alf had been, the force of Simon’s power smote him to the ground. For all the strength of his resistance, he might have been a child’s doll made of sticks and sent to battle against the sea. His shields were useless, his defenses vain. He was utterly, hopelessly outmatched.
Somewhere far away, Thea was speaking. Spitting words: defiance, maledictions. As easily as a man separates two newborn kittens, Simon held her apart from her lover.
Alf rolled onto his back. Simon gazed down, expressionless. “Get up,” he said.
Alf obeyed by no will of his own. It was all he could do to keep his head up, to speak without a tremor. “Is it thus you treat your brother?”
“We are no kin,” Simon said. Did his voice break a very little?
“We are brothers, if not in blood, then in kind. Look at me, Simon. See that it is so.”
“I see that you cannot overcome me. You can only plead with me.”
Alf spread his hands. “Destroy me, then. Am I not entirely in your power?”
“Entirely.” Simon’s face contorted; he shuddered. “You are so much—like—”
“So much like you. Slay me, my brother. Has not God commanded it? Cast me into the everlasting fire.”
“Silence him,” Paul commanded swiftly. His voice seemed to come from very far away. “He is ancient, my son, ancient in his evil. Silence his serpent’s tongue lest it turn you from the very face of God.”
Alf felt the closing of his throat, the freezing of his tongue. But he could smile. He could set his hands on the other’s shoulders. They were narrower than his own, although the man seemed sturdy enough, lean rather than slender. Brother, his will said. Brother.
Simon struck the hands away, struck Alf to his knees. “Like,” he whispered. “So like.” He bent, searching the lifted face. His fist caught it. It rocked, steadied, blinked away tears of pain. Fair though the skin was, the bruise did not rise swiftly enough. His power uncoiled. It reached, at once delicate and brutal. It wrenched; it twisted.
Alf gasped, more in surprise than in pain. He could not feel—he felt—
His face itched. Small annoyance; it baffled him. Simon was watching with terrible fascination. He raised a trembling hand. The skin had roughened.
No. Had grown—was growing—
He laughed for pure mirth. After all these long years, after all the taunts and all the doubts and all his hard-won acceptance, he was sprouting a beard. A soft one as beards went, but thick and growing as sturdily as Jehan’s had that night in Caer Gwent.
Simon did not take kindly to his merriment. For that alone he kept it up. His voice was deeper. His skin felt harsher. Were his bones heavier? His hands were slender still, but not as slender as they had been. They were becoming a man’s hands. Pale hair thickened on the backs of them. He itched elsewhere, his belly, his deepening chest. He was a little taller; a little broader. His beard was growing, curling, white-gold as the hair of his head.
His laughter faded. His knees ached. His back twinged, not scarred skin alone but the bones within. The skin on his hands coarsened. The joints knotted. Veins and tendons rose into relief. A tooth began to throb. His tongue, probing, found it loose. He was aging. Like a mortal man, but faster, far faster, a whole lifetime in a moment. Eyes and ears were dulling. His head was too heavy for his neck. Having grown, now he shrank and shriveled, trembling with the palsy of age.
His vision spun, staggered, sharpened to a bitter clarity. Simon had lent his own eyes. On the floor huddled an old, old man, a man who had lived every one of Alfred’s many years.
And yet he was not pitiable. He was—yes, he was still comely, and the eyes in the age-ravaged face, though faded, kept much of their old brightness. There was no fear in them.
Again he dwelt behind them in the wreck of his body. Not an ill body even yet, and not an utter ruin. He could stand, with great effort. He could smile. He could wield a voice not thinned overmuch, not indeed much higher than it had ever been.
“Alas, Brother Simon, you’ll never slay my vanity until you slay me.”
Simon’s rage roared over him in blood-red fire. He tumbled over and over, helpless, but not, by God, not ever afraid. The hand that held him from the floor was his own again, smooth and long-fingered. His cheeks bore only the merest downy suggestion of a beard. His teeth lay quiescent in their places; his voice, though well broken, was a clear young tenor. “My thanks, brother. In spite of its disadvantages, I do prefer this semblance. And now,” he said, raising himself, hardening his tone, “and now I think there has been enough of this entertainment. Simon of Montefalco, monk of Saint Paul, kinsman of Rhiyana’s King, I call you to the reckoning.”
He had taken Simon by surprise. “You have no power—”
“I have the right. The Church does not deny fair trial to any, even to such as I. Let that trial, by my choice, be trial by combat.”
“You cannot help but lose.”
“If so,” Alf said, “then so be it. I would far rather die in battle than at the stake.”
Thea flung herself to her knees beside him. No one hindered her. Simon was motionless, unreadable; Paul frowned, searching transparently for a trick, finding none. She gripped Alf’s shoulders with fierce strength. Although she knew that Simon would hear, she spoke in Alf’s ear, just above a hiss. “Have you forgotten the children? Have you forgotten me?”
“Never,” he answered, equally low. “Thea, we’re all dead, one way or another. But I won’t sell our lives cheaply. I’m going to try at the very least to mark him, to give him a wound that he will not forget.”
Her breath hissed between her teeth. She glared into his eyes, her own as fiery dark as old bronze.
He tried to speak to her below thought, to the place in his soul that was hers and hers alone. A hut of mud and wattle beset by a battering ram; a woman’s hand upon a tapestry, embroidering the petals of a flower. And, as clearly as he dared, a small furred creature gnawing away the roots of an oak.
Despair shook him. She did not see. Her eyes and her mind held only anger, outrage, frustration. “I’m fighting beside you,” she said, biting off the words. “You can’t stop me.”
He lifted one shoulder. His finger brushed the stiff set of her lips. They would not soften. “Whatever comes of this, know you well, Thea Damaskena, I regret not one moment of all our years together.”
“Not one, Alfred of Saint Ruan’s?”
“After all,” he said, considering each word, “not one.” He kissed her lightly, and then more deeply. When he rose she remained upon her knees, her face rigid, white as bone.
He turned to Simon. “I am ready.”
For an eternal while, Simon simply stoo
d. Perhaps he prayed. Perhaps he hoped to lure Alf into attack.
Alf was not to be lured. His formal praying was long past, the rest left to God. Fear had died to a steady roaring beneath the surface of his brain. He simply waited as he had waited for so long, with watchful patience. His shields were up, but lightly. His power gathered hard and bright and pulsing behind them.
He shifted his sight. The flawed hemisphere of his eyes’ vision grew and rounded. But he saw no more and no better. Simon filled the world like the sun unbound, raging from pole to pole. It had consumed its own center, the mastering will. It was consuming the body that bore it. Unchecked, it could consume all that was. Could, although in the doing it would destroy itself.
Alf’s fear howled within its chains, swelling into terror. He had never stood so close to death. Had never dreamed, even when he faced the stake, that dissolution could come so close.
He had never met a power greater than his own. He let wonder rise above the fear, riding on it, arming himself with it. If that mighty strength could be tamed, what a marvel it would be; what splendors it would engender.
He shaped the wonder and the vision. He made them into a spear hafted and tipped with light. He cast them forth with all the strength of his compassion.
Simon struck as a man strikes at an insect, with casualness close to contempt. Alf’s shields locked; he staggered but kept his feet. His dart had pierced its target. The sun-flare dimmed. A flicker only, scarcely to be seen.
The power lashed out in sudden rage. Alf dropped shields and fled. Wherever he turned, the power waited. He flung himself at it. Not as a spear, not as a sword, but as a rush of gentleness: a soft wind, a fall of water. He whispered through the walls. He flowed round the striking hand. He took shape in a zone of stillness within walls of fire.
Simon waited there as he waited in the world that men called real. “Wherever you go,” he said, “I am.”
Alf stepped forward. Simon drew no closer. Alf’s body, illusion that it was, shaped and firmed by his will, had begun to fray. Just so had it been when he had lost the key to the change, when his form stretched and quivered and all his being wavered, poised on the border of formlessness. The same dread; the same black panic rising to master him, to fling him back, to set both body and soul in immutable stone.
Stone itself flowed like water, water dissolved into air, air sublimed into fire. He was trapped, caught in the center of Simon’s power. There was no anchor, nothing solid or stable, no shape or focus or center. Death—not the death the Church foretold, the soul freed whole and glorious from the encumbering body. This was the death of the soulless. Decay; dissolution. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and a wind of fire sweeping away the last feeble fragments. But not into oblivion, nothing so simple or so merciful. He was aware. Lost, scattered, millionfold, he knew that he was, he knew that he suffered, he knew that he knew.
Of the myriad motes that had been the self called Alfred, one lone speck clung to light and will. It was no more than a thought, a wordless awareness. Not for his kind could there be any hope of Heaven, but Hell, it seemed, waited for them as for mortal men. If the wordless could have encompassed itself in words, it would have protested like a child. It’s not fair!
A second mote drifted toward the first. Fair, it keened, not. A third. A fourth. Not. A fifth. Ten, twenty, a hundred. Just. Half a thousand. Unjust. A thousand. Why for us only Hell? Why are we granted no entry into Heaven?
Thought spawned thought. Raw protest transmuted into logic. Logic begot reason, and reason remembrance. Remembrance, and pain renewed. He had found form, and that form was a scream.
Pain was real. Pain was a center. Dissolution, dissolved, wrought stability. He clung, and clinging, grew; and the pain grew, waking into agony, and from agony into piercing pleasure.
He must endure. He knew not why. He knew only must. Though it wracked his newborn self, though it tore with claws of iron, though it cried to him to let go, he only clasped it closer.
He was mind amid pain. He was body. He was flesh flayed raw; and a hand closed about it, waking agony beyond even pleasure—ineffable, unendurable. And he could not lose consciousness; he had none to lose. He could not even go mad.
The hand tightened. Caught writhing on the very pinnacle of torment, he did the simplest of things. He wished himself gone.
Absence of pain was more terrible by far than its eternal presence. He had a body; it lay gasping. It opened aching eyes.
The hands upon him eased but did not let go. Thea’s. He was englobed in power still, and she with him, and even as their eyes met they mingled. Yet without fear, with full and joyous will, mind to mind and body to body, he and she, they, one mind and one power. One body likewise, he and she, shifting, steadying, she. But the eyes were his; the hand also, for a moment, exploring the strange-familiar shape, familiar from his long loving, strange for that now he dwelt in it. He felt his lips—her lips—curve in a smile. Her smile. They called forth their power.
29.
The hour of Matins had come and gone. Jehan had not gone to sing the Office, nor had Oddone. Anna and Stefania had quieted at last, Anna drowsing, Stefania seeming to drowse by the cooling brazier. Nikki knew that it was only a seeming; that she watched him, oblivious as he feigned to be, and brooded. Considered what she had fallen into; wrestled with flat incredulity. It could not be as she imagined. There was Anna asleep, the monk and the priest all but asleep, Nikephoros pretending to sleep.
But there was Cynan wide awake, playing on the floor with a shadow and a bit of string. The shadow in his hands had substance, although when he let it go it was merely shadow. And when he turned toward the lamp, his eyes caught its light and flamed.
Nikki left the bed without thinking, went to her, sat at her feet. She could not muster a smile, but she touched his cheek with a fingertip. He laid his head in her lap. So simply he did it; so simply she accepted it. But she did not cease her brooding, nor did her touch linger.
Nikki snapped erect. Cynan too had heard it, that cry of unspeakable anguish. The child’s form flickered. Nikki flung himself at it. Dimly, distantly, he knew the shock of a great weight falling upon him. Then weight and world were gone, swept away.
Cynan struggled, protesting. Why do people always fall on top of me? Nikki, crushed, had neither breath nor wits to answer.
The tangle sorted itself. The weight was Father Jehan, staggering up and shaking his head groggily. The world was strange, but familiarly strange, Anna’s old prison. Between the newcomers and those who were there before them, it was full almost to bursting. Alf and Thea, clad alike in voluminous white, lay side by side with a stranger who bore Alf’s face. Over them all and regarding the arrivals with surprise stood Brother Paul, with Liahan struggling in his grip.
She won free, scrambling round the still bodies. Cynan met her in mid-flight. Their bodies twisted and blurred and mingled. An alaunt, a manchild; a womanchild, an alaunt; twin alaunts, twin children side by side, her hand upon her mother’s brow, his upon his father’s. The scent of power was chokingly strong.
Jehan, never one to reflect when action was wiser, launched himself at Brother Paul. Nikki had not long to watch the battle royal. Power, the power he had met twice before and to his sorrow, had risen against him. The fourfold will of witch and witchling offered no such tempting target as one lone, bemused human creature, given power himself but never born to it, marked and sealed with mortality.
It was immeasurably strong and immeasurably cruel. Human, it mocked him. Mortal man. It showed him himself as in a mirror, but realer than any image cast upon glass: a shape of earth and clay, ill-made, incomplete, brother to the mute beast. But even a beast had five full senses.
His image cowered. It was rank with filth. A strangled moan escaped it, an unlovely sound bereft even of human music; and he himself less lovely still, a scrap of bone and hair, a lingering stink, a hint of the death that waited to claim him.
Far down in the hollow that had been his soul, s
omething stirred. It looked like himself, yet not the sorry creature the mirror had shown him; the Nikephoros Stefania had dreamed of. It lifted its head; shook it slowly, then more firmly. Its jaw set, stubborn. Little by little, with effort that drew the lips back from the white teeth, it stood erect. Raised its arms. Refused.
The power over him, vast ebon hand, paused in its descent. He was conquered. How dared he resist?
He was human. He could not help but resist. Poor impotent half-cripple that he was, he hurled himself upon the hand, upon the mirror it held, upon the lying image.
The mirror shattered. The image hung in the mocking air, but it withered and shrank, melting away.
Wrath rose in a blood-red tide. He flung back his tangled hair; he turned half-crouched, searching, nurturing his fury. Father Jehan had his knee in the back of the stranger-monk, the man choking out a plea for mercy. The rest had not moved at all.
He was forgotten. His victory had been no true victory; he had been discarded in favor of a stronger opponent. In the moment of distraction the fourfold mind of his kin had drawn Simon in, had beset him with power even he could not despise.
Nikki did not try his own bruised power. His anger was growing, honing itself into perfection. Human, was he? Crippled, was he? But he had hands. And he had a weapon. No named blade, no sword of heroes, only the little silver-hafted knife he used at meat, but it was Damascus steel, slim and deadly sharp. Alf had given it to him when he grew from page into squire; it had a falcon graven on its blade. He drew it, seeking neither silence nor concealment, advancing upon Simon.
No lightnings drove him back. No mighty force of power struck him down. He knelt beside the still body. It might have been asleep. So Alun had seemed to be upon his bier, but Alun’s breast had not risen with a slow intake of breath. Alun had died by this man’s will, for no more reason than that he was there to be slain.
Nikki raised the knife. Lamplight flamed on the polished blade. He narrowed his eyes, shifted his grip upon the hilt. This was a just execution. This was Rhiyana’s salvation. With all his strength he struck.
