Hounds of God Read online

  There were perhaps a score of them. They ran tall, although there were knights of the court who overtopped the tallest; they were paler of skin than most, although some were ivory. Man and woman, or rather youth and maid, for the eldest looked hardly to have passed his twentieth year, each with the same cast of feature, narrow, high-cheeked, great-eyed. And the same beauty—a beauty to launch fleets of ships, to whistle kingdoms down the wind, fierce and keen and splendid as the light upon a sword.

  And as changeable, and as changeless. Just so had Alf been, monk and master scholar of an abbey in the west of Anglia, ordained priest long years before Coeur-de-Lion was born. Just so had he been in the debacle that was the Crusade against Byzantium, when the Great City fell and a Prankish emperor ruled over the ruins. Just so was he now with king and emperor long in their graves, and so would he always be. Blade or bolt might end his life. Age and sickness could not.

  It should have been unbearable, Jehan supposed. He found it comforting. A deep, warm, pagan comfort that his priest’s conscience chose not to acknowledge nor to condemn. Like the old Pope with his grimoires, who sang Mass with true devotion and called up his demons after, the scholar’s mind knew its divisions. In one, God and the Church and all the Canons. In the other, Alfred and his kin and his high white magic, and his perfect constancy. Whatever became of the world, he remained. Would always remain, a bright strong presence on the edge of Jehan’s awareness.

  His physical presence was a rare and precious thing, to be savored slowly, in silence. But this time the pleasure could not last. Memory flooded, cold and deadly. Jehan’s muscles knotted.

  Alf’s grip tightened, though gentle still, a mere shadow of his strength. He did not speak. A warmth crept from his arm and hand, soothing, loosening, healing.

  Jehan set his teeth against it. “You’re perilous, you know,” he said, trying to be light, “like lotus flowers, or poppy. Won’t you let me suffer a bit? It’s good for my soul.”

  “Is it?” Alf asked. “Not that I would know, who have none.” His glance was bright, full of mockery, but like Jehan’s own it had a bitter core.

  Jehan flashed out against it. “You know that’s not true! You of all people in the world, who wrote the book for all our theologians to build on.”

  “They build on Aristotle now,” Alf said, “and on the Lombard’s Sentences. Not on my Gloria Dei. Which may be almost as great as its flatterers make it, but it remains in its essence a testimony to one man’s pride. If man you may call him—and when he wrote it, a beardless brilliant boy of thirty-three, he knew that he was not.”

  “You were scrupulous. You defined the soul according to Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Martianus. You quoted Scripture and the Fathers and every recorded authority all the way to the Lombard himself. You corrected the philosophers’ errors; you reconciled the canonists’ contradictions. But nowhere,” said Jehan, “did you exclude the possibility that you yourself, in your immortal body, might not possess an immortal soul.”

  “I still had hopes then of my own mortality. Hopes only, but they were tenacious. They dissolved long before my vows.” Alt smiled with no appearance of strain. “It rather amuses me now. Arrogant innocent that I was, embodying all theology in a single book and sending my first copy direct to the Pope. As if all the vexed and vexing questions, answered, could encompass the reality of God—or even of a woman’s smile.”

  “God and woman are great mysteries. But there’s some comfort in answered questions, and more in your book, however you shrug it away.”

  “Not for me. And not for the busy scribblers in the schools or in the Papal Curia. They have no love for simple solutions, nor for my lamentable touch of mysticism. They’ll lock all the world into their Categories; any who fails to fit them must be anathema.”

  Jehan shuddered deep and painfully. “You’re prophesying. Do you know that?”

  “For once,” Alf answered, “yes. Tell me what you have to tell.”

  “What need of that? You know already.”

  “Tell me.”

  But Jehan, whose ready tongue was famous, could not bring himself to begin. “The King—does he—”

  “He hears.”

  He was on his throne in a circle of nobles, deep in converse with a portly prelate, the Archbishop of Caer Gwent.

  He was the Elvenking. He could hear what no mere man could.

  Jehan drew a slow breath. Foolish, he upbraided himself. It’s nothing so terrible. Tell it and have done!

  His voice went at it cornerwise. “It’s been a bitter year, this past one. John Lackland of Anglia dead and buried, and a child crowned in Winchester; though it’s a strong regency we’ll have, and I’ll see my own country again. Pray God I can stay in it for more than a month at a time. I haven’t done that since Coeur-de-Lion died, close on twenty years now. But I’m going back in fine fettle, with a bishopric to hammer into shape, and a good number of friends at court and in the Church. I’ll do well enough. I could only wish...”

  “You wish,” Alf said for him when he could not, “that Pope Innocent had not died hard upon the Anglian King, as if their long struggle for control of the See of Canterbury, once ended, left nothing for either to live for. And you wish that Innocent’s death hadn’t slipped the muzzles from his Hounds.”

  “The Hounds of God.” It was a sour taste on Jehan’s tongue. “The Order of Saint Paul of the Damascus Road. Hunters of the Church’s enemies. Richard threw them out of Anglia for your sake; John at least had the sense to keep them out, and the Regents will see that they stay there. They’re not faring so splendidly well elsewhere, either. When the Cathari in Languedoc murdered the Pope’s legate, Innocent preached a Crusade against all heretics, and the Paulines swarmed in like flies to a carcass. But someone else had got there first: that Spanish madman, Domingo, and his Preachers. That was Innocent’s doing, who’d never had much use for his Hounds; he found them intractable.

  “Now Innocent is dead and Honorius is Pope, and Domingo’s irregulars have been signed, sealed, and chartered: the Ordo Praedicatorum, with a particular mission to preach the Gospel to the lost sheep of Rome. But Honorius is no fool. He knows he doesn’t have Innocent’s power, or the sheer gall, to kennel God’s Hounds; and they’re yapping in his ear day and night. Languedoc? What’s Languedoc? A few villages full of Cathars, and a priest or two with a harem. There’s a better target in the north. Small but fabulously rich, ruled not by mere mortal heretics but by children of the Devil himself.”

  “Rhiyana,” Alf said calmly.

  “Rhiyana,” Jehan echoed him, without the placidity. “Or Rhiyanon, or Rhiannon. With such a name, how can it be anything but a lair of magic? And with such a king. Gwydion makes no secret of what he is, nor could he. The whole world knows how long he’s held his throne. Fourscore years, of which he shows a mere score-and he was a grown man when he began. Even the Pauline Father General doesn’t try to deny that the throne came to him from his safely mortal father. His mother was another matter. A woman of unearthly beauty, come out of Broceliande to love a young king, bearing his sons—and a daughter who died as mortal women die, though no one has much to say of that—and keeping her loveliness unaltered through long years; and when her lord died, vanishing away into the secret Wood, never to be seen again. It’s fine fodder for a romance. It’s meat and drink to God’s Hounds.”

  Alf was silent, clear-eyed, unfrightened. Jehan’s hands fisted on his thighs. “Rome has always walked shy of Rhiyana. It’s never submitted to invasion, but neither has it encroached on its neighbors, nor meddled—publicly—where it wasn’t wanted. Its King is noted for his singularly harmonious relations with his clergy, is in fact a most perfectly Christian monarch, unstinting in either his gifts or his duties to Mother Church.

  “True, he’s banned the Hounds from his domains, and he’s been strict in enforcing it. But it’s not the Hounds themselves who make me tremble. It’s not even the fabric of lies and twisted truths that they’ve woven around the Pope; t
hey’ve been weaving it since their founding.” At last he let it go. “They’re preaching a Crusade.”

  “Ah,” said Alf. “It’s no longer a mutter in the Curia. It’s a rumble in the mob.”

  “It’s more than a rumble. It’s a delegation sent to investigate the Church in the realm, and it’s a gaggle of preachers mustering men in Normandy and Maine and Anjou. All your neighbors; not your great allies, but the little men who are their vassals, the barons with a taste for plunder, the mercenaries with a taste for blood. And the poor and the pious, who shrink from slaughtering their fellow man—however doctrinally misguided—but who would be more than glad to rid the world of a sorcerer king.”

  “The delegation we know of,” Alf said. “It’s to arrive by Twelfth Night. A legate from the new Pope with a train of holy monks. They will, His Holiness informs us, undertake to ascertain that all is well with the Church in Rhiyana; that the clergy are doing their duty and that the King harbors no Jews or heretics.”

  “God’s teeth!” cried Jehan. “How can you be so calm about it? Even without Gwydion’s lineage blazoned on his face for a blind man to see—even if the Folk can bottle up their magic and the human folk resist the Pope’s Inquisitors—they’ll all burn for the rest of it. Rabbi Gamaliel in his synagogue near the schools, the Heresiarchs debating the divinity of Christ with the Masters of Theology, and Greeks and Saracens mingling freely with good Christians in the streets. This kingdom is a very den of iniquity.”

  “Monstrous,” Alf agreed. “Like the madman—heretic surely, and lost to all good doctrine—who proclaimed: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’”

  Jehan realized that his mouth was open, gaping. He closed it with a snap, and suddenly laughed. “Alf! You’re dangerous.”

  “I can hope so. For so are our enemies. Deadly dangerous; and for all our power, we of Gwydion’s Kin are very few. If I can hold off the attack by my wits and my tongue, mark you well, I will.”

  “But it will come. I’m a mere man and no prophet, but I know that. I feel it in my bones.”

  Alf said nothing. His eyes had returned to Thea. It was as clear as a cry: the love he bore her and the children she carried; the fear that he would not—could not—admit. And he was a seer. He knew what would come.

  Jehan seized him with sudden fierce strength. “Alf. Go. Go soon. Go now. Go where nothing human can touch you.”

  His heavy hands should have crushed those fine bones, but they were as supple as Damascus steel. “You can,” he pressed on in Alf’s silence, easing his grip a little, but not the intensity of his voice. “You told me years ago, when Gwydion gave you Broceliande. It’s only half in this world now—the Wood, the lands and the castles, even that part of the sea. You can close it off completely behind a wall of magic—”

  “Power,” Alf corrected very gently.

  “Isn’t it all the same?”

  Alf’s face was unreadable, his eyes—slightly but clearly, damn him—amused.

  Jehan persisted doggedly. “Gwydion was born in the Wood. He’s always meant to go back; to be King for as long as he’s needed, to withdraw gracefully, to vanish into legend. It’s all very pretty, very noble, and very much like Gwydion. But even he—he’s wise, the wisest king in the world, but I think he’s waited too long. If he goes now, before the delegation comes—if you all go—you’ll be safe. And Rhiyana won’t suffer.”

  “Will it not?”

  “How can it? You’ll all have vanished with perfectly diabolical cowardice. Rhiyana will be an unimpeachably human kingdom.”

  “And Rabbi Gamaliel? The Heresiarch Matthias? Hakim bin Ali and Demetrios Kantakouzenos and Jusuf of Haifa? Not to mention my own dear brother and sister, the last of the House Akestas—what of them? Shall we abandon them to the Church’s tender mercies?”

  Jehan’s fear turned to sheer annoyance. “Don’t tell me you haven’t found a refuge for each and every one of them, and all their goods and chattels.”

  “If so,” Alf said, unruffled, “it’s not this way that we would go, like a flock of frightened geese.”

  “Not even for your children’s sake?”

  Alf went stark white. His eyes were truly uncanny, vague yet piercing, seeing what no other could see.

  Abruptly they focused. Jehan saw himself mirrored in them, pale and shocked but set on his course. “Go,” he said. “Take a day if you must, settle your gaggle of friends and infidels, and leave. Or do you want to see Rhiyana laid waste around you, and your people under Interdict, and a stake on a pyre in every marketplace?”

  Alf smiled. But the color had not returned to his face. “Jehan, my dearest friend and brother, we know exactly what we do. Trust us. Trust Gwydion at least, who rules us all. He’s known for long and long what must finally come to be, the payment for all his years of peace. He will not leave it to his poor people, who love him and trust him and look to him for protection. Only when they are truly and finally safe will he leave them.”

  “But he is their danger. You all are. Without you—”

  “Without us and with all our infidels gone to haven, the Crusade loses it target. Or does it? This is a land of fabled wealth, soft and fat with long idleness. A splendid prize for an army of bandits, far more splendid than poor ravaged Languedoc. Where, I remind you, my lord Bishop, the Cathari have been the merest of pretexts.” Gently, with no perceptible effort, Alf freed himself from Jehan’s grasp. “I grant you, the Crusade is our fault, for existing, for tarrying so long in the mortal world. But Crusades have a way of outgrowing their makers, like the demons in the tales, destroying the sorcerers who invoked them.”

  Jehan knew that as well as Alf. He had been to Constantinople. He had helped to shatter that city in a war that had begun in order to free the Holy Sepulcher; had twisted and knotted and broken, turning from a Crusade against the Saracen into the gaining of a throne for an exiled Byzantine prince, and thence into an outright war of conquest.

  “Yes,” Alf said, following his thoughts. “But this will be no Byzantium. Not while Gwydion is King.”

  “Or while Alfred is Chancellor.” Suddenly Jehan was very tired. He had ridden all the endless way from Rome into the teeth of winter, striving to outrace the Pope’s men. He was not old, but neither was he so very young; and he had a long battle ahead of him in his own country, a bishopric to claim and defend, a kingdom to aid in ruling. And this was no land and no people of his—by his very vows he should have shunned them.

  And yet, like the great, half-witted, ridiculously noble fool that he was, he loved them. Alf, Thea, the two young Greeks they had brought out of the fallen City; Gwydion and his Queen and his fiery brother and all his wild magical Kin; even the land itself, the prosperous towns, the green burgeoning farmsteads, the woods and the fields, the windy headlands and the standing stones.

  Certainly he was a bad priest and very probably he was damned, but he could not help it. He could not even wish to.

  Alf’s hands were warm and firm upon him, Alf’s eyes as gentle as they were strange. “God knows,” he said softly, “and God is merciful. Nor has He ever condemned love truly and freely given. To do that would be to deny Himself.”

  So wise, he, to look such a boy.

  Alf laughed. Jehan flushed, for that was a thought he had not meant to be read. “Didn’t you, brother?” The thin strong hands drew him up. “Come. It’s a bed you need now, and a long sleep, and a day or two of Rhiyana’s peace. That much at least is left to us all.”

  2.

  It was all silence and a splendor of light.

  If Nikki chose, he could enclose it in words. High cold sun in a blue vault of sky; waves crashing, sea-blue and sea- white, and the White Keep glowing upon its headland. But closest, within the reach of his eyes, the city in festival.

  Bright as its houses always were, carved and painted and gilded, they shone now in the winter sun, hung with banners, looking down
on a vivid spectacle. Lords and ladies with their trains, mounted or afoot or borne in litters, brilliant with jewels, gleaming in precious fabrics; knights in glittering panoply; burghers robed as splendidly as princes; free farmfolk in all their finery; whores dressed as ladies and ladies dressed well-nigh as shamelessly as whores, laughing at the cold. Jugglers and tumblers; dancing bears and dancing dogs and apes that danced for coins; a rope-dancer on high among the rooftops, actors mimicking him broadly below; jesters in motley and friars in rags, and now and then an eddy where a minstrel sang or a musician played or a storyteller spun his tales.

  His nose struggled to match his eyes. Humanity, yes, from rank villein to rank-sweet noble. Incense—a procession had gone by with a holy relic, drawing much of the crowd after it until some new marvel caught their fancy. Perfume and spices, roasting meat, bread new baked and wine well aged, and manifold delights from the sweetseller’s stall a pace or three upwind.

  A hand shook him as if to wake him from sleep. He looked into a laughing mischievous face, nearly on a level with his own although it was much younger: the face of a boy, a page, a tall slight gangle of a child with hair like ruddy gold. “Dreaming, Nikephoros?”

  With the words came understanding, and with understanding, all in a flood, the clamor of the festival.

  Nikki reeled. Alun held him up, still laughing, but chiding him through the mirth. “You shouldn’t do that.”

  No, indeed he should not, but the silence made the rest so wonderful.

  “Maybe,” Alun said, speculating.

  And Alun should not do it either. Nikki put on his best and sternest frown. It would have been more effective if he had been larger or his eyes smaller, or his mouth less tempted to laughter. At least he had the advantage of age—a good six years’ span—and, just barely, of wisdom.