Hounds of God

by Tarr, Judith

  “You hurt,” Alf said, simple as a child. But he lowered his hands to his sides.

  “Nikki hurts. I have a matter to settle with my confessor. Leave it at that.”

  Alf was not disposed to. There might have been a battle, for Jehan was adamant, had not Nikki come between them. Even light-headed with Rafaele’s potion, he was well able to shield his own pain, what the drug had left of it. Brother, he said to Alf, go and eat. Oddone’s raided the Abbot’s kitchen for you. You too, Father Jehan. You can have your fight later.

  They glared with equal hauteur, equal intransigence. Nikki laughed at the likeness. Which brought their anger upon his head, but he only laughed the harder. Collapsed, in truth, giggling helplessly, until Stefania shook him to make him stop.

  Bishop and Chancellor bent over him. He grinned, unrepentant.

  Alf sighed. Jehan’s lips twitched. Alf said, “You too, infant. Don’t you know it’s deadly to balk power?”

  We humans can take care of ourselves. Nikki said it with newborn pride. Go and quiet your stomach, Alfred. It’s growling like a starving wolf.

  It was a starving wolf, and it needed firm restraint lest it gorge itself into sickness. Alf took some small comfort in seeing that no one else went hungry, Nikki in particular, who would have settled for a cup of wine. Even Paul had his fill; Alf fed him calmly as one feeds a young child, although his glare was baleful.

  Nikki ate as little as his brother’s tyranny would allow, and outdrank them all. His temper had taken a turn for the worse. When Stefania stoppered the wine bottle and set it out of his reach, he scowled, flung his cup down, flashed his eyes over the gathering. Simon Magus is dead. Rhiyana is free of his power. What now?

  “Rhiyana is free of little.” Though fed and rested, Alf looked weary still. He had reclaimed his chair by the brazier, and Liahan was with him, half asleep. Her profile against his robe was his own, blurred and fined by her youth and her sex. He laid his cheek upon the kitten-softness of her hair. His voice, though quiet, was stern. “The Crusade rages. The Interdict has fallen. The King may be past any hope of healing.

  “And yet,” he said. “And yet I refuse to despair. Listen now, and hear what we shall do.”

  oOo

  Nikki drew his hood closer about his face, and wished that Thea would. Or at least that she would bow her head in proper humble fashion. If she insisted on walking into the Mother House of Saint Paul rather than willing herself into it, for no other reason than a love for the dramatic and an hour to spare, she could at least forbear to invite curiosity. Particularly since she had done nothing to disguise herself save to swathe her body in mantle and hood, dark enough but to his eyes not particularly deceptive. She was still a graceful witch-woman with the bearing of a queen.

  Stop fretting, child, she chided him silently. Nothing human can see anything when it’s as dark as this.

  I can, he muttered. But he eased a little, enough to raise his head and walk more steadily. They were close now to the place they sought, a fortress crowned with a cross, standing just out of the shadow of Castel Sant’Angelo. No shadow now, to be sure, with the sun long since set and Compline rung, and neither moon nor stars to lighten the sky.

  Thea walked coolly to the barred gate and set hand and power upon it; it opened in silence upon darkness and a scent of cold stone. Cold hearts, Nikki thought as Thea led him beneath the arch. As soundlessly as it had opened, the gate closed behind them.

  For an instant his lungs labored, crying that there was no air. He gasped, struggling for quiet. Thea was already a horse-length away. He stretched to catch her.

  If San Girolamo had made Nikki desperate for freedom, San Paolo Apostolo won from him a heartfelt vow. Never again, not even as a guest, would he shut himself up within the walls of a monastery. He would find his God under the sky, or if he must, in churches where the doors were never shut. Not in these prisons of the body that closed all too often into prisons of the soul.

  Thea seemed unmoved, walking without stealth through cold halls and cold courts, up lamplit stairs, past the darkened cells of monks and the dormitories crowded with novices, to that arm of the stronghold from which the Father General commanded his Order. All was quiet there as elsewhere, even the clerks and secretaries sleeping, and no guards to challenge the invaders.

  Such arrogance, to trust in high walls and in the Pope’s favor. Nikki’s scorn almost made him forget his panic-hatred of the place.

  The Pope’s favor is no small thing. Thea opened a door like a dozen others along the passage, upon a cell as bare as a penitent’s. It had not even a bed, only a crucifix upon the wall, and under it, stretched out like one crucified, a man of no great height or girth, remarkable for neither his beauty nor his ugliness. His face bore the ravages of pox, ill hidden by a sparse brown beard; his body was thin in the white habit, his feet bare and gnarled and not overly clean. Yet upon his face and in his mind blazed a white light.

  Nikki’s head shook from side to side. This man prayed exactly as Alf prayed, with a purity of concentration, in an ecstasy of communion. But what he prayed for and what he stood for, those were inimical to all Alf was.

  “Father Alberich,” Thea said. Her voice tolled like a bell. “Father Alberich von Hildesheim, you are summoned.”

  The outstretched arms folded inward. The still features woke to life; the eyes opened, grey-green, kindling as they fell upon her face.

  Their brilliance was like a blow. Yet far worse was their awful gentleness. Even Thea dimmed a little in the face of it.

  She raised her chin; she put aside mantle and hood. Beneath them she was arrayed in splendid simplicity, gown and overgown of deep green, her hair bound with a fillet of gold. “One of your Brothers is dead,” she said, “and one is a prisoner. You are summoned to defend them.”

  Father Alberich rose. “Who summons me?”

  “Justice.”

  “And if I cannot come?”

  “You will come.”

  He smiled. He knew no fear that Nikki could see, and if any hatred touched him, it was lost amid his wonder at her beauty. “Ah, Lady,” he said sighing, “it is a very great pity that you are of the Devil’s children. Such loveliness should be consecrated to God.”

  “How so? My hair cut off, my body sheathed in sacking and ravaged with penitence?”

  “Of course not, for then you would not be so beautiful. Though it could be argued that your soul’s beauty would more than make up for your body’s lack.”

  “Except,” she said, “that in your philosophy I have no soul to beautify. But that may be as ridiculously wrong as all the rest of it. Your sorcerer monk is dead. I’m no authority, but one was there who can testify that he went to something other than oblivion.”

  “Sorcerer monk. Lady? We of all Orders can have had none such.”

  Nikki snorted. Thea laughed short and fierce. “Don’t lie to yourself, Father General. You know what Brother Simon was. You always knew, however you chose to disguise it. Saint and worker of miracles, mystic, child of God—he was of my own kin.”

  With perfect serenity Father Alberich conceded, “Perhaps he was. I grieve that he is dead. He was a great warrior of God.”

  “He was mad and he was tormented. Your fault, Father General, as much as that of the low creature who ruled him. You did nothing to break that bond; you kept it strong, you left them free to work what harm they could. We owe you a debt, we of Rhiyana. Now we will pay it.”

  “If I die, our work will continue. Rhiyana is ours; it has returned to the hand of God. No sorcery can rob us of it.”

  “Rhiyana indeed is yours, if yours are war and hatred, death and destruction and the spreading of wasteland where once was peace and plenty.”

  His eyes were sad, his voice soft with sorrow. “War is always terrible, and the war for souls is worst of all. But a desert can grow green again, if men’s souls are freed from darkness.”

  “And if there never was darkness? What then, priest of God?”

&nb
sp; “Night is Satan’s day and darkness his light. You tempt me, beautiful demon, and I may yet succumb, but the Order has won this battle in its long war. Nothing that you do can alter it.”

  “Can it not?” She held out her hand as to a wayward child. “Come to judgment, Father Alberich.”

  oOo

  For one who had seen Constantinople before its fall, walked the length of the Middle Way and looked on the splendor of the imperial palaces, the dwelling of the Pope seemed an echo and a defiance of that royal glory. Its guardians were the images of old Rome, that some said carried still an antique magic: the she-wolf of the empire; the head and the hand of some forgotten giant, whether Samson or Apollo or the Emperor Constantine, his fingers clasping the orb of the world; and mounted on a stallion of bronze, right hand upraised in warning or in command, the image that pilgrims called Marcus or Theodoric and the Romans Constantine, who could have been any or none, but whose pride was the pride of the Pope of Rome. Behind the haughty back rose a tower of bronze like the ChalkÍ of Constantinopolis, the great gate and tower that had stood between the sacred Emperors and the world; and beyond the tower, the palace of the Lateran.

  It stood in a city within and apart from the city of Rome, built on the slopes and summit of the Caelian Hill near the eastern walls. East of it lay fields and farms and the walls themselves; empty lands stretched westward to come at length to the Colosseum and the borders of the living city. There Romans and pilgrims preferred to stay, the former by the banks of the Tiber among their own kind, the latter gathered about the basilica of Saint Peter in the Leonine City.

  “Pope Innocent had sense,” Jehan had said to Alf once when they had leisure to talk of trifles. “He built a castle up on the Vatican Hill in the Borgo San Pierro, ample enough for a palace and strong enough for a siege. More will come of that, I think. It was never a wise choice to try to build a new city of God so far away from what was left of Rome and its Romans, not with Saint Peter staking his own claim out past Sant’ Angelo.”

  But Saint John of the Lateran clung to his honors, and where the Pope was and had been for nigh a thousand years, there was the Curia and the heart of the Church. A heart of minted silver, many would say, but the truth remained. Saint Peter’s could call itself foremost of all churches, omnium ecclesiarum caput. Saint John’s was caput mundi, foremost of all the world.

  Jehan stood with Alf well within the gates of the Lateran, a shadow among the many shadows of the Pope’s bedchamber. Unseen and unheard, they could hear with ease what passed in the workroom without.

  Cencio Savelli, Pope Honorius, was little like the vigorous young man who had ruled before him. He was old, his hair thin and grey round the tonsure; he had been tall for a Roman, but years and care had bowed him. He looked too frail by far for the burden of his rank, holy paradox that it was, prince of the princes of the Church, servant of the servants of God. And yet he had outlived all Innocent’s youth and brilliance; when that had burned to ash in its own splendor, he had risen in his turn to the Chair of Peter. Neither young nor brilliant, one no longer, one never, in his quiet careful way he continued as Innocent had begun.

  “No,” he said, gentle but immovable. “No, Brother, you may not. We need you here.”

  The other was equally gentle, equally obstinate. “God needs me among His poor.” He was kneeling at the Pope’s feet; he raised bandaged hands, the bandages rather cleaner than the rest of him. “Holiness, I have dreamed. I have had sendings. I know what I must do, and that is not to be a hanger-on, however honored, of your Curia.”

  “Cencio’s tame saint.” Honorius smiled a little sadly. “Fra Giovanni, I too have my dreams and my duties, however much they may be clouded by this eminence. Not all destitution of spirit dwells in hovels; much of it has settled among the princes of the Church.”

  “Have I no Brothers to teach them by word and by example? May I not at least return to my own Assisi and minister to God’s poor there, if only for a little while?”

  “That,” the Pope said slowly, “I may consider.” Hope had leaped in the wide brown eyes; he laid his hands on the ill-barbered head. “My son, my son, we all have such need of you, and yet your remedy for our hurts is much too strong to be taken all at once. All the world at peace in the faith and the poverty of the Apostles—a vision worthy of Our Lord, but not so simple to accomplish.”

  “It will come,” Giovanni whispered. “God has promised. It will come.”

  “But not too soon,” said Honorius, half in foresight, half in warning.

  There was a silence. The Pope pondered. Giovanni, undismissed, bent his head in prayer.

  Suddenly he lifted it. He looked toward the inner door with clear and seeing eyes. “Holy Father, do you believe in angels?”

  Honorius started out of his reverie. “Angels, Fra Giovanni? Of course.” He said it as if to quiet a very young child. “They are in Scripture. But what—”

  “One has come to speak with you. How generous of Heaven’s messenger to wait upon another and much lesser petitioner.”

  “No creature of Heaven, I,” Alf said. He had entered as no mortal might, through the closed door, bearing his own faint silver light. He was all in grey, rather like a Minorite, but no poor brother of Christ would have worn wool so soft, or belted and brooched it with silver. He went down in obeisance before the silent staring Pope, and remained kneeling as still Fra Giovanni knelt. “Earth bore me and earth keeps me; I have never been a messenger of God.”

  “No, brother?” murmured Giovanni.

  He neither expected nor received a reply. The Pope looked from Alf’s lifted face to that of the man who, recovered at last from the shock of Alf’s vanishing, entered in more human fashion. Recognition sparked; bewilderment lessened. “Jehan de Sevigny, did I never give you leave to claim your see of Sarum?”

  Jehan, prevented by the Pope’s impatient gesture from kneeling with the others, stood straight and found his voice. “You gave it, Holiness. I’ve been detained.”

  “So it seems.” Honorius” eyes returned to Alf. The wonder in them was untainted by either fear or hate, although he knew well what knelt so meekly at his feet. “It would also seem that both these men know you. May I share the honor?”

  “Alfred of Saint Ruan’s,” Jehan said before Alf could speak, “Lord Chancellor of Rhiyana and emissary of its King.”

  Honorius rose from his chair. His gaze never left the fair strange face. “The White Chancellor. We have heard of you, great lord. We have heard it said that you were once one of ours. Impossible if you were a mortal man; disturbing if you are the being of the tales.”

  “If the Devil may quote Scripture,” Alf said, “it follows that the Devil’s minion may become a master of theology. Particularly if he be very young and rather too proud of his erudition.”

  “Yet orthodox,” mused the Pope. “Most orthodox. My predecessor knew the truth of you, I think. He loved to read the Gloria Dei, so perfect it was, so succinct, so divinely inspired. But he would always smile when he spoke of its author.”

  “And you. Holy Father? Do you smile? Or do you gnash your teeth?”

  “I have not Innocent’s love for paradoxes. He was a great man; I am merely a man. I can do no more than guide myself by the Church’s teachings.”

  “Even if they stem not from God but from human fear?”

  “So speaks heresy. Lord Chancellor.”

  “Or so speaks wisdom,” Fra Giovanni said with rare force. “Holy Father, hear the tale he has to tell. Any living thing deserves that much of you.”

  Pope Honorius paused, caught between wrath and strict justice. He had been invaded by what could be nothing but witchery, with boldness mitigated not at all by the enchanter’s evident humility. And now the first of the Friars Minor, that gentle thorn in the Church’s side, had arrayed himself with the enemy.

  Honorius lowered himself again into his chair, making no effort to conceal his weariness. “Tell your tale, sir,” he said, “but tell it swiftly.”
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  Alf bowed his head in assent. As he raised it, the air shifted and shimmered. Thea walked out of it with Nikephoros, leading the Father General of Saint Paul.

  That brave man wasted no time in either astonishment or panic; he went down on his knees before the Pope. Now three knelt and three stood, a tableau almost menacing in its symmetry.

  Father Alberich’s presence lent no comfort. He had the look of a martyr at the stake, white and exalted.

  Honorius wondered briefly what his own face betrayed. Alf’s eye caught his; he shivered. It was not a human eye, yet it was very, very calm. Serene. As well it might be. Saint Peter’s throne offered little protection against such power as this creature wielded.

  Alf shook his head slowly. “While my kind dwells in this world, it must admit the power of your office. Consider how very few we are, how very many the people over whose souls you rule.

  The Pope shivered. Not even his thoughts were his own tonight. “If you chose, you would rule them all.”

  “We do not choose. We do not even dream of it. The one of us who did is dead; and he was our enemy, the power behind the Crusade, a monk of the Order of Saint Paul.”

  That brought Honorius erect. He had not known it. He did not believe it. God and the Church were not so mocked.

  “His name,” Alf said gently and inexorably, “was Simon. He had power the like of which even we have never seen, nor ever wish to see again. It drove him mad; it devoured him. Hear now what he wrought, he and those who made use of him.”

  Told all together in that soft calm voice, it was terrible; it was pitiable; it was most horribly credible. “Without Brother Simon,” Alf said, “no doubt the Crusade would have mounted on the wave that shattered Languedoc. But Rhiyana could have withstood it, turned it back without bloodshed. Its people would suffer no war and no Interdict.” He drew a slow breath. “What is done is done. Simon died repentant; God has taken him, he is at peace. Not so those who wielded him. Sworn to destroy all works of sorcery, they loosed a sorcerer mightier than any in the world; in their zeal to raise their Order above all others, they resorted to that very power against which they thundered. In God’s name, God’s Hounds turned to the ways and the arts of the Adversary.”