Hounds of God Read online

  This was worse than death. In a score or two of years, Jehan himself would die; if the doctrine he preached was true, he would live again with those he loved about him. But not Alfred. Not any of these people whom he had come to love as his own blood kin. “Except one,” he said. “The one I hated. God help me! I slit the wrong throat.”

  “Jehan—”

  He spun away.

  “Jehan de Sevigny, what did you say to Anna about growing up?”

  He spun back. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  Alf went on quietly, almost absently, as if Jehan had not spoken. “I was never very good for you. I demanded so much of you. So much looking after; so much thankless pain.”

  “As if I didn’t give back every bit of it ten times over.” Jehan sat down slowly. Suddenly he was very tired. “I’m a disgrace,” he muttered. “Anna, that stubborn little snip of a girl—she grew up. She let you go. But I who was preaching that doctrine to her, I’ve been bellowing like a weanling calf.”

  Alf said nothing. Jehan laughed painfully. “Don’t fret, Alfred. I’ll wean myself. When you’re gone I’ll do what they do in an abbey when a sainted Brother dies, and declare a three-days” festival.”

  Still silence. Cynan was utterly subdued, even when his father set him on the carpet by the fire and walked to the window. The cold snowlight leached the gold from Alf’s hair, the youth from his face.

  He had never looked less human. Jehan had never loved him more. His voice came soft and slow. “Jehan, there is one thing. I would—if you would—Thea and I, we would like our children to belong properly and formally to God, however we all may end. I know it is Lent, I know you should not, but since there will be no chance hereafter…will you perform the rite for them?”

  Jehan’s throat closed. He wrestled it open. “Of course I will. If you can still want anything to do with the Church that cast you out into the cold.”

  Alf turned swiftly, all his ice turned to fire. “But it did not!” He reached Jehan in a stride, grasped the wide shoulders, shook them lightly. “Jehan, Jehan, didn’t you understand? Didn’t you see? His Holiness exiled us all, and in a very strict sense we are excommunicate—cast out as no humans ever have been, set apart from every office of the Church. That was his duty, his obligation under canon law. But when he spoke to me, behind and among his words he told me another thing. He left me to God and to my own wisdom. He set me free.”

  Jehan shook his head, denying nothing, trying only to clear his fogged brain.

  “Listen,” said the eager beautiful voice. “See. He struck away the chains I forged of a lifetime in the cloister. He said, Go, find your God where He waits for you, where He has always waited for His strangest children. I was a priest, I am one still, I shall be forever, but of what faith or rite or order, only God may tell me. For what is a priest after all, but a servant of God?”

  The mingling of exaltation and sorrow that had lain on Alf since they left the palace of the Lateran, that had seemed the simple bitter-sweetness of a victory won hard and at great cost, lay now all bare to Jehan’s wondering eyes. Honorius, the devious old courtier, had shown Alf the way out of his long dilemma, and done it without a single uncanonical word. And Jehan had thought that the Pope was only casting all his troubles into the lap of a higher Authority.

  “What more did he need to do?” asked Alf. “He has sense, does Cencio Savelli: the one thing I’ve never had. Thea would be angry, if she weren’t so highly amused. It took the Pope of Rome to convince me of what she’s always known, that I’m flesh and spirit both, and I can’t deny one at the expense of the other. I can’t go about as half a man, even the half that seemed so happy with its lordship and its lady and its worldly riches. I have to make myself whole.” His hands left Jehan’s shoulders; he shivered, and for a moment the light went out of him. “It’s hard. I don’t need prophecy to tell me it will never be easy.”

  “If it were, would you want to bother with it?”

  “No,” Alf admitted wryly, “I wouldn’t. Sometimes I could sing for joy that the burden is gone. Then I sink down under a world’s weight of terror and pain and loss. You’re not alone in hating to grow up.”

  “You’ve already grown far beyond me.” Jehan straightened, found a smile. “And if I know you, you’ll get a treatise out of it all.”

  Alf laughed. “Yes; and I’ll set it against that great arrogant folly of my youth, the Gloria Dei: a Gloria magici, a Tractatus de rebus obscuris et tremendis. And no doubt when I’m as old for my kind as now I am for a man, I’ll smile at all these childish fancies.”

  “As long as you don’t forget how to smile,” Jehan said.

  Alf smiled at that with every appearance of ease. Jehan turned away too quickly, eyes and ears and mind closed against any calling back.

  oOo

  It was meant to be a quiet celebration, a Mass and a christening at dawn in Saint John’s chapel, with such of the Folk as would come, and no great fanfare. But even before the first glimmer of light had touched the sky, the small space was thronged to bursting. They had all come, all the King’s Kin who were still outside the Wood, and the Archbishop in plain Benedictine black, and the Cardinal Torrino, and Duke Rhodri who would be King by sunset, and a number of lesser folk: courtiers, servants, clerks and officers of the Chancery. Everyone who knew that this day’s hunting party would not return. Alf had not realized there were so many.

  And yet no pall of grief hung over them. They were sad, yes; Rhodri above all looked worn and ill; but they could take a quiet joy in this gathering and this rite.

  King and Queen held each a wide-eyed child, Liahan and Cynan both swathed in white silk, but the mere weight of fabric had no power to subdue them. Their minds wove and unwove and rewove with one another, restless, curious, taxing even Gwydion’s legendary patience with a barrage of questions. Thea did not stoop to theology, and Alf was not answering: Jehan had coaxed and cajoled and bullied him into the sacristy, and all but forced him into alb and dalmatic. “Just once,” the Bishop said. “Just one last time. For me.”

  But for Alf’s own sake too, and Jehan was not fool enough to think that thought would go unread. Pope Honorius had set Alf outside the Canons, freed him from them, but spoken no word that forbade him to serve upon the altar.

  “And if he had,” Jehan growled, “I’d give you a dispensation, and fight it out with him myself.”

  Alf laughed, but he was shaking uncontrollably. Absurdly, needlessly; and how many times had he done just this, for Jehan, for Bishop Ogrfan who was dead, even once for the Archbishop of Caer Gwent? He had not been free then. He had served out of a goodly measure of defiance, to prove to himself that he had escaped all the chains of the cloister.

  He had never been as close to panic then as he was now, with the chains a glittering dust about his feet, and his exile full before him. Exile more isolate than any abbey, whiter than the whitest of the white martyrdoms of the island saints, and more complete, set apart within the walls of Broceliande. Once the last gate closed, no mortal man could enter, nor would any immortal depart, perhaps beyond the end of this world.

  The altar waited, gleaming softly in its cloth of moonlight and snow. There would be none such where he was going, and no one to raise the Host before it, or to speak the ancient holy words. The chapel in the House of the Falcon was an empty tower open to the stars, with no emblem of any mortal worship. No cross, no crescent, no star or idol or sacred fire. No mask before the face of God.

  Yet this altar and this cross, how familiar, how much beloved. This big man with his lived-in, ugly-beautiful face, and his clear eyes, and his heart that was even greater than his body, vesting slowly and trying not to resist Alf’s ministrations-how hard, how cruelly hard to know that they would never stand so again. To stay, to cling, to refuse the burden…

  So then. He could stay. He could defy the Pope, who after all was but a mortal man. And in a little while he would go mad, and there would be a new Simon Magus to torment
the world. Even now his power surged against the walls of his control, urging him, tempting him to heal every hurt that came close to him, to open himself wide to all his visions of what would be. It was growing stronger. The duel with Simon, the battle with Gwydion, had swelled it from a constant and endurable ache to a desperate need.

  No; it was as well that he was going away. His battered shields were falling one by one. In too brief a while he would be naked, and then he would shatter.

  Jehan was vested, waiting, a line of worry between his brows. Alf took up the censer. With a small, childish, rebellious flare of power, he kindled the coal within it.

  A smile touched his lips, skittered away. Some of the fear fled with it. In the chapel without, Liahan was asking Gwydion why she had to be presented to God, if He had made her. Was He so forgetful that He needed to be reminded?

  The smile crept back, settled, grew a little. The fear slunk into shadow and pretended to sleep.

  It was a Mass like any other, and yet it was not. Benedetto Torrino approved the devotion and the sheer physical presence of the man who wore the chasuble, but his eyes lingered most often upon the acolyte. The boy, as it seemed, who performed the duties of a servant, quiet, self-effacing, and bathed in a light that owed nothing at all to lamp or candle or rising morning.

  It flared to a white fire when King and Queen brought their charges forward. The words and the water flowed over the dark head and the fair one, but the Kindred were not looking at the mortal priest. Alf had emptied his hands of cloth and vessels, and his mind, it seemed, of human rituals. Even as the words of baptism rolled into silence, he raised his hands, and they were filled with light. It brimmed and spilled and flowed as the water had, and the words he sang were the same, and yet how utterly different, for he sang them not with throat and tongue and lips but with the purity of his power.

  The light faded as water will, vanishing into air. Liahan shook her damp head and laughed, sudden and sweet in the silence. Alf kissed her brow and that of her brother, smiling the most luminous of all his smiles, and withdrew again into the meekness of the servant. The Bishop of Sarum blinked like a man roused from a dream, shook himself, continued the Mass.

  oOo

  “There walks wonder and splendor,” said the Cardinal to the Queen, whom chance and perhaps design had placed beside him in the exodus from the chapel.

  Gwydion was well ahead with his brother and his somber successor; the lesser ones had scattered, the children been entrusted to their mother, the Folk gone to ready themselves for the riding. So were they alone, they two, if well within sight of the celebrants in the sacristy. From where he stood, Torrino could see the blur of white and gold that was Alfred divesting the Bishop of his chasuble.

  “His Holiness saw with truly miraculous clarity,” Torrino went on, “to do as he did with your kinsman. But did he know that there could be such glory in our own rite? The Mass of the white enchanter… There, surely, is one who has seen the light before the throne of God.”

  “So he has,” she said, “and he has shown us its dim reflection. Which is fortunate for us, whether we be mortal or immortal; we have not his gift, to face the full Glory and live.” Her face was still, her eyes downcast. “That is his task. To be the bridge; one might say, to be our saint. I find, now my queenship is over and my exile begins, that I am very glad of him. He at least is going to fulfill his nature.”

  “And you are not?”

  She shrugged simply, as a child will. “I have never known, truly and indubitably, what I am. I was a village witch. I became a queen. I was never wholly content with either. Now I shall be... I know not what. Do you know that we will be alone? No servants. No attendants. Only ourselves and our power. It is going to be very strange.” Her eyes lifted; they were clear gold. “It is a whole new world.”

  He looked at her and his own eyes dimmed. Already she had severed herself from humankind, had turned mind and heart upon that world no mortal would enter.

  She and her wedded lord. She had greeted Gwydion’s return with courtly propriety, but Torrino had seen the spark that leaped between them, and the sheen that had lain upon them since. He had made himself see it. He had made it his atonement.

  He made himself bow, although a smile was beyond him. “Whatever you become, you can never be less than royal.”

  Her laughter both angered and soothed him. “But, Eminence, that is only habit and the weight of a crown. I shall be glad to see the last of both.”

  He was silent. Her eyes softened; her voice grew gentle. “I shall always remember you.”

  “That,” he said with control that amazed them both, “is a very great gift.”

  “I must go.” She kissed him lightly, yet that lone brief touch would burn him lifelong. “Fare you well, my lord.”

  oOo

  They rode out in the cold clear morning, all the Fair Folk together, with hawks and hounds and the Queen’s wolves and one small green-eyed black cat that rode in the fold of Nikephoros’ sling, and a company of mortal men who would witness the passing of the Kindred. The King’s aging seneschal led them, somewhat grimmer-faced even than his wont, and Jehan had attached himself to them.

  No one stopped him. Not that he had any delusions of anonymity; the beard he still wore, and the Jeromite habit kilted over high soft boots, were even less disguise here than they had been in Rome. He established himself beside Alf, and there he stayed, saying little, doing his best to think of nothing beyond the moment.

  Nikephoros rode far back, somewhat apart from the rest. He had glanced back only once at Caer Gwent; at the tower from which the King’s banner still flew, proud merciful deception; at the people lining the road between.

  They would not know until he was long gone that they had seen the last of their Elvenking. That even now the twice-great grandson of his sister, a mortal man, not young, sat in the King’s chamber with his Duchess who had become his Queen, and contemplated the crown which Gwydion had laid in his hands. They were Rhodri’s people now, who cried Gwydion’s name, who even paused here and there and muttered against a king who could ride a-hunting so close upon so grim a war.

  Nikki barred his mind to them. They had never been his own folk. He was born a Greek; he had become an enchanter. His adopted kin rode ahead of him, some silent and somber, some singing. More than once Tao-Lin looked over her shoulder, almond eyes at once bright and soft. He willed himself to smile in response. Tonight, she promised, a thought like a caress.

  He shivered and cast up all his shields. The silence was blessed; appalling. His hands and feet, unguarded, throbbed with cold. He turned his face to the brilliant warmthless sun. The same sun that shone on Broceliande, yet not the same at all. The walls of power made it strange. Softened it, turned its glare to a wash of gold.

  His traitor mind cast him back to the sun of Rome, potent even in winter. Showed him his own face that could not even blanch to white, only to sallow grey, so long had the eastern sun burned upon his ancestors. And raised up an image he had schooled himself never to see again.

  On the night of the King’s return, Tao-Lin had come to Nikki’s bed. It was nothing new or shocking; she had come many a time before, as he had come to hers. The two of them had always reckoned that they were lovers, though not, to be sure, in the pure and single-minded fashion of those other scandalous sinners, his brother and the Lady Althea.

  That night when the war ended, Nikki had welcomed Tao-Lin. Had made her laugh and exclaim that he was eating her alive. Had taken her with something very like brutality. And through every moment, seen not those bright black eyes, but eyes the color of evening. Stroked skin like perfect ivory, and remembered soft dark down on human flesh. Clasped her who had been a famous courtesan, and could think of nothing but a sweetly awkward, very mortal woman.

  He shook his head, eyes clenched shut. Their choices were all made. She had returned to the course she had long since chosen, and he was riding to the fate that had been his since an Anglian enchanter fell su
nstruck upon the road to Byzantium. What had been between them had been diversion only. Lust; infatuation. A few days’ glorious folly. She had learned swiftly to hate him, and by now she would have learned to forget him. In Broceliande, where power ruled and human fear could not come, he would forget her. This was only pain; it would pass.

  But ah, before it passed, how terribly it hurt.

  It did no good to open his eyes. The sun smote them; the wind whipped them to tears. The earth was harsh and winter-grey and bitterly beautiful, stretching wide before him all unexplored.

  He would explore the world within, the realm of power that was vaster than the earth and all upon it. And some of the Folk spoke already of wandering beyond; it was only the world of men that was barred to them. To rise beyond the circle of the moon, to walk among the spheres of the planets, to seek the stars in their courses—what was mere dull earth to that?

  “What indeed?”

  Nikki started a little. Alf was beside him, and his mind had fallen open by no will of his own, to gape like a wound. Fiercely he forced it shut.

  But Alf had got inside it and would not be driven out. There was no defense against that voice. Soft, gentle, relentless. The face had nothing soft in it, and very little that was human. “Frankly, Nikephoros, I had thought better of you.”

  Nikki sat stiff and cold in the saddle. He would not ask. He did not need to. “You know well what I’m getting at. Are you set on committing yourself to this madness?”

  Are you?

  “For me,” Alf said, “it’s the only sane choice. But I’m not speaking of myself or of my kin.”

  I am one of you.

  Alf shook his head. “You are not. You never were.”

  Nikki abandoned words for his speech of the body, wild, cold, edged with iron. He was of the Folk. He was made to be like them. Alfred himself had done it.