Hounds of God (16 page)

If Brother Simon was listening indeed, this was surely
driving him wild. Anna inspected the food that Simon’s power had left,
found it much the same as ever. She brought the meat to Thea, settling herself
with the rest. Between bites she said sagely, “Oh, yes. Those attributes.”

Thea nibbled the edge of her portion, her eyes bright,
amused.
I admit, though I was expecting
more than a weedy boy, that first good look… I was a hound at the time; he
was bathing, and he didn’t even know I was there. Saints and angels! What
a lovely moment that was! Then he saw me, or more likely heard me panting, and
he didn’t do anything I’d expected, except blush in the most
fascinating places. He just kept on washing, ignoring me steadfastly and not
saying a word. Not hurrying to hide anything, either. That was when I knew I
had to have him. White skin, white hair, and all.
She sighed, letting the
meat fall back into its bowl.
My poor
love. Left all alone, and Alun gone who might as well have been another son…
Damn
these devils of monks!

It was very quiet in San Girolamo. Strangely, when Alf
stopped to think; Jeromite monks kept no constant vows of silence, and Rome lay
outside with its bells and its clamor. But the walls were high and thick, the
monastery itself set somewhat apart in the hollow of the hill. From its tower
one could see the loom of the Palatine with its white ruins; the city sprawling
and crowding down to the river; the bulk of the fallen Circus and the green
waste within, and at its far curved end the battlements of a castle.

But within the abbey’s walls one might have been in a
separate country, a kingdom of quiet. In a round of days marked off by the
ringing of bells, the monks went about their business, soft on sandaled feet.

Not that they shuffled and whispered. They spoke and laughed
freely enough; the novices had their moments of boisterousness, and the Offices
were well and heartily sung. Yet no amount of human uproar seemed able to shake
the calm of the ancient stones.

It was sinking into his bones. He had entered it with deep
misgivings, even with fear; castigating himself for a fool—he had grown
up in just such a place and guested in many since, both as a pilgrim and as a
lord of Rhiyana—but trembling still, because he had left Saint Ruan’s
far behind but never quite lost the yearning for it.

Yet how easy after all to walk through the gate, to exchange
courtesies with the gentle aging Abbot, to settle into the guesthouse that was
all Oddone had promised and more. How simple after attending Mass as courtesy
demanded, also to take part in the Offices, even those of midnight and of dawn,
for the bells were insistent and sleep had become a stranger. And if he was
there, he could not but join in the prayers and the singing, stumbling a little
at first but waking soon to memory.

Within a day or two, he never knew exactly how, he found
that he was no longer relegated to the outer reaches of the chapel with the
guests and the pilgrims and the Roman matrons in their black veils; he had a
place in the choir between Jehan and Brother Oddone, with Prior Giacomo in his
stall behind.

With the same invisible ease, he found himself in the
refectory with the Brothers, partaking of the common fare. Jehan, bishop though
he was, was claiming to be but a lowly monk; he could not in good conscience
dine thrice daily at the Abbot’s table. Nor would his companions partake
of fine meats and wine while he dined on black bread and refectory ale; they
joined him among the monks, taking their frugal meals in silence to the sound
of the reader’s voice.

oOo

“You fit with us well,” said Prior Giacomo.

After days of rain, the sun had returned at last. In
celebration, Oddone had haled Alf off to a corner of the cloister, set him
down, and begun to sketch him under the Prior’s interested eye.

“Just a short time you’ve been here,”
Giacomo went on, “and you’ve made yourself one of us.”

At Oddone’s bidding, Alf raised his chin a little. A
vagrant breeze played with his hair. Although he had gone to Brother Tonsore to
have it cut, commanded the man to have no mercy, he had lost a scarce inch. It
was too handsome, the barber had told him with fine Italian logic, and he was
no monk, to have to go about looking like one.

With that in his memory and a faint wry smile touching his
lips, he said, “I try to be a good guest.”

“By now,” said Giacomo, “you’re
hardly one at all. Brother Marco tells me you’ve been putting in a good
day’s work in the scriptorium.”

“He seemed to have need of another hand.” And it
made the days easier. Nikki did his hunting in body as well as in mind, roaming
the ways of the city with Jehan at heel like a watchful mastiff. Alf could not
search so. He stumbled; he groped like a blind man; he forgot to move at all.

But in the scriptorium in the scents of ink and dust and
parchment, where the only sound was the scratching of pens and the occasional
turning of a page, his body could look after itself. The words flowed from eye
to hand to parchment; the lines stretched out behind, letter after swift
meticulous letter; and his mind ran free, hunting the coverts of its own
strange world.

Prior Giacomo sat on a stone bench, taking care not to
intrude on Oddone’s light. For all his brusque air, he was a pleasant
presence, a gleam of friendship.

Alf let it ease him. His mind was still a raw wound; the sun
though winter-pale was strong, his shields against it unsteady.

Once long ago, when after a bitter quarrel Thea had left him
and closed her mind to him, he had let the sun work its will. It had burned him
terribly for his foolishness. And he had not even been her lover then, only her
friend and her fellow pilgrim.

Although this was not the awful glare of August on the
shores of the Bosporus, yet it was potent enough to touch such a creature as
he. It pressed down upon his head, deceptively gentle. Shielded, he could meet
its glare, his eyes—night-eyes, cat-eyes—unwinking. Unshielded—

Light stabbed him to the soul. His shields leaped up and
locked, a reflex as sure as his eyes’ flinching. Even so brief an instant
had nearly destroyed them; he could feel the tightness of his skin, the
beginnings of pain.

To the monk and the Prior it was only sunlight, cool and
frail. So must he be to his enemy, feeble, powerless, unworthy of notice.

The Prior was watching him; he saw himself reflected in the
dark eyes. Other faces, however flawed, at least were honest, the parade of
emotions all open and clear to see. His own was like a mask, white, perfect,
serene. For a fiery instant he hated it.

Giacomo was speaking again. He forced himself to make sense
of the words. This was not Caer Gwent, where the strange moods of the Kindred
were known and accepted. But the man was speaking in the Roman dialect, the old
Latin tongue blurred and softened into foreignness, and Alf could not make his
wandering brain remember its ways. He could barely even remember the pure and
ordered Latin of the schools.

He must have risen. He did not know if he spoke. The sun and
the cloister were gone; the cool shade had him, the old, old refuge, the chapel
walls.

These were strange and gaudy with their glittering mosaics,
but the altar was still the altar, the Christ dying still upon his familiar
cross. A man dying for men; what cared he for the anguish of the one who knelt
before him? Anguish born of mortal sin: sorcery, fornication, abandonment of
the vows that had made him a priest forever.

Yes. Mortal, in all its senses. All his being howled in
pain, but not the smallest speck of it knew any repentance.

He was not human, to subject himself to human doctrines of
sin and salvation. Sorcery he was born to; it was his nature, as much a part of
him as his eyes or his hands. Fornication he might atone for if he had ever
found any foulness in it, if it had ever brought him aught but joy. For his
vows’ forsaking he had the Pope’s own dispensation, signed and
sealed and laid away in a coffer in the House of the Falcon.

So facilely did a scholar dispose of his sins. He sank back on
his heels and lowered his face into his hands. Darkness was no refuge. It
deepened, broadened, gaped to swallow him. Not his own death but Alun’s.
Not his body’s destruction but the shattering of his mind.

He could not find Thea or his son or his daughter. For all
his power knew of them, they might never have existed at all. He could not even
sense their nearness—not even the nearness of the power that had taken
them.

His fingers tensed, clawing. He could not see. He could not
see
. All prophecy was gone from him.
There was only the cavernous dark.

He thrust against it, striking it, striving to tear it;
raging, half mad and knowing it and caring not at all.

He flailed at air and shadow. It yielded, ungraspable yet
deadly as the mists of Rome with their burden of fever. His mind reeled,
toppled, fell.

Voices babbled. Light flickered. He shrank away.

Meaning crept through his barriers. “Signore. Signor’Alfred.
Please, are you sick? Signore!”

Another voice, deeper and rougher, cut across the first. “He’s
taken a fit, I think. Go fetch Brother Rafaele. I’ll look after him.”

Alf struggled, snatching at a retreating shadow, pulling it
up short. The shadow gained substance. Brother Oddone gaped down at him, for
once far taller; he was lying on the stone, its cold creeping through his heavy
robe, and in his hand in a death grip, the hem of the boy’s habit. “No,”
he tried to say. “I’m not—”

Oddone’s incomprehension stopped him. His eyes began
to blur again. He willed them to be clear, and his mind with them. He had been
speaking no tongue a Roman would understand, the Saxon of his childhood.

He dared not trust his wits with Italian. He groped for
Latin words, found them at last. “Please, Brother. Don’t trouble
Brother Rafaele.”

The hands on him were Prior Giacomo’s, holding him
down though when he tried to sit up they shifted to aid him. “We’ll
trouble the good Brother, sir, and no arguments. Whatever it is that knocked
you down, it hasn’t let you go yet.”

Alf pulled free, not gently, staggering to his feet. For no
reason at all, he was whitely angry. “Have you no ears? I do not wish to
be carried off to your infirmary!”

“So carry yourself,” Giacomo said sharply,
meeting glare with glare and temper with temper. “If you’re not
sick, Rafaele will say so. If you are, he’ll know what to do about it.”

“Leeches. Purges. Ignorant nonsense.”

“If you know so much better, what were you doing in
convulsions on the chapel floor?”

Alf’s body snapped painfully erect. Rage tore through
it. Blind babbler, mortal fool; how dared he—

Convulsions?

Giacomo had him by the arm. That was ignorance in the man,
to be so utterly fearless. Yet he was walking obediently, strength and power
and skill in combat forgotten, lost like all the rest of his proper self.

He willed his feet to be still, his frame to stiffen in
resistance, his voice to speak levelly. “There is nothing any physician
can do for me. I know. I have been one.” The Prior scowled. For the
second time Alf freed himself, but smoothly now, his temper mastered. “Your
concern does you credit, Brother Prior, but my illness can have no earthly remedy.
It’s past for the moment; let it be.”

Giacomo might have burst out in bitter words. But Oddone,
thrust aside and all but forgotten, leaped eagerly into the gap. “Is it
so, signore? Is that why you came here? For a miracle, to cure it?”

Alf turned, mildly startled. As always, Oddone’s thin
nondescript face warmed something in him; almost he smiled. “Yes. Yes,
that’s why I came to Rome.”

“I’ll pray,” Oddone said. “I’ll
pray as hard as I can. God will listen.”

The smile won free. Alf touched the narrow shoulder lightly.

Darkness howled. He staggered.

Giacomo caught fire with vindication; Alf fled his hands.
For a moment he had seen, his power whole and keen and terrible, potent enough
to set him reeling.

But there was no joy in that sudden glorious release. Even
for a man, born only to die, Oddone was frail. Death sat like a black bird on
his shoulder. Its servants prowled his body, haunting the lungs, the laboring
heart, the innocent brilliant brain.

They had had a long lodging in him, from weak and struggling
infant to sickly child to fragile dauntless man. In a little while they would
conquer him.

Alf shook his head, tossing it. His face was fixed,
frightening, but Oddone did not know how to be afraid. The brown eyes were wide
and trusting, troubled for him, thinking he was perhaps in pain.

Death would abandon no mortal creature, not even at the
command of elvenkind. Death’s servants had no such strength. Alf called
on all the singing splendor of his power.

And it came. Limping a little, wounded, yet it came.

Oddone blinked. Alf unclamped his hand from the monk’s
shoulder. “Good day, Brother,” he said. “Pray for me.”
He bowed to the Prior, genuflected to the altar, and left them all.

“How strange,” Oddone murmured. “How very
strange.”

Giacomo would have liked to spit. He satisfied himself with
a snarl. “Strange? The man’s an utter lunatic!”

The other had not even heard him. “I feel warm.
Especially where he touched me. He’s amazingly strong; did you notice?”
He shook himself slightly. “I have to get back to my drawing. The look he
had when he touched me—if I can manage—a line or two, I think; a
touch of light, color—”

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.