Hounds of God (19 page)

He shook his head as if to clear it. With a sharp cry Thea
crumpled, shifting, struggling, woman to hound to white wolf to golden lioness.
Out of the fading gold battled a great gyrfalcon, stretching gull’s
wings, blooming into such a white beauty as the world had never known outside
of a dream. But the beauty raged, and the horn was edged bronze, lunging toward
the enemy.

Simon smote his hands together. Thea fell without grace as
if to grovel at his feet, all naked save for the cloud of her hair.

He regarded her with cold contempt. “Why do you
persist in opposing me? I cannot be overcome. No power on earth is greater than
mine.”

She levered herself up on her stiffened arms. “So you
admit it. You
are
the Lord of the
World. Mere mortals are encouraged to do battle against you; should I do any
less?”

“Your tongue,” he said, “would not shame a
viper. Be one, then. Match your seeming to the truth of you.”

Thea laughed in his face, a little loudly perhaps, ending it
as a hound’s bark. She crouched thus, braced for combat. But he only looked
at her without expression.

At length he said, “So would Brother Paul have you be.
Remember that you chose it of your own free will.”

oOo

He went away for a merciful while. But he came back as if he
could not help himself, standing and staring, his fists clenching and
unclenching at his sides.

Anna was telling a tale to the children; none of them would
give him the satisfaction of acknowledging his presence, though Anna’s
voice faltered now and then. She was in the midst of the tale of the pagan
wanderer Odysseus, in its own age-old Greek, which no doubt outraged his
fanatical soul.

The beautiful ancient words rolled on and on. Anna’s
mouth had gone dry. Simon stood like a shadow of death.

Her throat closed in mid-word, nor would it open for all her
striving. Rage swelled, too great by far to let in fear. How dared he thrust
his power upon her as if she had been no more than a buzzing insect? He did not
even look at her as he did it. She doubted that he thought of her, except as an
annoyance, like a crow cawing.

She could stand. She could, she discovered, raise her hand
and make a fist. The absurdity of it flashed through her mind, a small brown
mouse raging and striking at the Devil himself.

She struck as hard as she could, as high as she could. Not
very hard and not very high, but it did its work. He looked down amazed.

It was well past time for her to be afraid. While he ignored
her she had been safe from the direct lash of his power. She had sacrificed
that. He saw her now; she watched him take her into account: wrath, impotence,
and all. She braced herself for the lightning’s fall.

His brows knit in puzzlement, in a little pain. “Why,
child,” he said in a voice so gentle it froze her where she stood, “what’s
the trouble? Has someone hurt you?”

She blinked. Her mouth gaped open; she forced it shut. She
had to remember that he was mad. Yet he looked so sane, so kind and so kindly,
lowering himself to one knee to gaze into her face. “What is your name?”
he asked her.

He had killed Alun, tried to enslave Liahan and Cynan. He
was tormenting Thea. Anna hated him with an enduring and deadly hate.

Tried to. This too was a spell. A spell of gentleness worthy
of Alf himself.

She stiffened her spine. “You know what my name is,
you devil. Just pick it out of my mind.”

Pain tautened the lines of his face. “You hate me. You,
too. They all hate me, all of them. Why? I never want to hurt anyone. But they
hurt me so much. They tear at me. Why? God loves. God commands that we love not
only Him, but each other, too. Why do you hate me?”

He had seized her hand. Her skin crawled at the touch, but
she had no strength to pull free. She barely had the strength to answer him. “Because
you hurt. Because you destroy. Because you kill.”

His head tossed in denial. “It’s not I,”
he cried. “
Not
I! It’s
the other, the one who lives in me, behind my eyes. The rioting fire. It has
its own will, and strength—dear Lord God, strength to rend worlds. But no
soul; no intelligence to rule it. Mine is not enough, has never been enough. I
try—I fight it. Sometimes it yields. Sometimes it rages without me,
working its will as it chooses. Making. More often destroying.
It
is the one who kills. I am left to
suffer for it.”

He spoke as if it were the truth. Maybe for him, in that
instant, it was.

“There is only one of you,” Anna said, cold now
and quiet. “You can’t separate power and conscience. Obviously you’ve
never learned to control either, and that is more than a tragedy. It’s a
deadly danger.”

The grey eyes were like a child’s, wide and luminous
with tears. “I know. Sweet saints, I know. All my life I’ve fought,
I fight, but whenever I think I’ve gained the mastery, the power swells
and grows and escapes. It’s a monster in me, like the hideous thing, the
affliction the doctors call the crab, that devours all it touches. O child with
the beautiful eyes, if you have any wisdom at all, tell me what I can do to
conquer it!”

Anna had gone beyond astonishment as beyond fear. She
regarded him. Kneeling, he was not quite as tall as she, his fair face drawn with
anguish.

His grip was like a vise, just short of pain; his whole body
beseeched her. He was so like Alf, not the splendid joyous Lord of Broceliande
nor even the beloved guest of Byzantium, but the Alf Anna knew only in stories,
the monk of Anglia with all his doubts and torments.

Once more she stiffened her back. This was not Alf, unless
it were an Alf lacking some vital part. A strength, a resilience. A core of
steel. This one had only stone, flint that could chip and shatter, with a heart
of deadly and uncontrollable fire.

“I can’t master your power for you,” she
said. “Only you can do that.”

“I’m not strong enough.”

She glared. “Of course you aren’t, if you keep
saying so. Whining so, I should say. You’re not human, that you can
afford either laziness or cowardice. Get rid of them and you’ll have what
you’re begging me for.”

“No,” he said. “Maybe once—before—
No. It’s grown too great. I haven’t grown with it. It’s my
master now, and I its slave.”

“Because you let yourself be.”

His eyes darkened as if a veil had fallen across them. He
let go her hand. “Perhaps. Perhaps it is God Who is master. He speaks to
me like thunder, like the whisper of wind in the grass. He commands me: ‘Go
forth, be strong, conquer in My name. Let no man stand against Me.’”
He rose in the mantle of his madness. “No man, no woman, no creature of
night’s creation. I have been shaped in the forge. I am the hammer of
God.”

“You are a madman.”

“Yes,” he agreed willingly. “It’s
God, you see. He’s too strong for flesh to endure. The old heathens knew.
They said it, and I know it for truth. Whom the gods would take, they first
drive mad.” His hand rested lightly, briefly, on her shoulder. “I
would regret it if I could. I don’t like to cause pain, even in God’s
name.”

Anna shook her head. She could not—would not—debate
with lunacy.

He smiled the first smile she had ever seen on his face. It
was sad and very sweet. She turned her back on it. Well before she moved again,
he had gone.

To her surprise and much to her dismay, she found that she was
crying. For anger. For weariness. For simple pity.

“Anna. Anna Chrysolora.”

She opened her eyes, squinting in the changeless light.
Almost she groaned aloud. Simon sat by her, saying her name with a soft and
almost witless pleasure.

She snapped at him, cross with sleep and with the compassion
he forced on her. Hate was so much simpler, so much more satisfying. “Don’t
you have anything better to do with yourself?”

“No,” he answered, unruffled.

“No Masses? No Offices to sing? No other prisoners to
torture?”

“It’s after Prime. You know there are no other
prisoners here. Only you and yonder whelps and that other who crouches in a
corner and tries to find a chink in my power. She won’t find one.”

“You are arrogant.”

“I tell the plain truth.”

Anna sat up, knuckling the last grains of sleep from her
eyes. She felt filthy; she ached. Her courses were on her at last. God’s
own curse in this place, in front of this monster.

He clasped his knees. It was a most unmonstrous posture,
boylike indeed with his clear young face atop it. “Brother Paul is
coming,” he said. “He grows impatient. We gain nothing while yon
witch defies me.”

“I should think you’d hold us for ransom. Then
you’d have a chance of gaining something.”

“We have asked. The price, it seems, is too high.”

Anna swallowed. Suddenly her throat was dust-dry.

He heard the silent question. “We ask no mere treasure
of mint or mine. We will have the witches, all of them, subject to the justice
of the Church, and Rhiyana ours to lay under the rule of God.”

“And, no doubt, power in the Papal Curia above the
upstart Preachers.”

“You are a wise child,” he said. “Our
Order is older than Domingo’s, its mission more clearly from God; it has
been slighted most often and most unjustly. See now, we have it in our power to
lay a whole kingdom before Peter’s Throne, to destroy a whole people
created by the Devil’s hands.”

“That’s heresy,” Anna pointed out.

His eyes glittered. “It is truth. They are evil. They
wield the powers of darkness; they enslave men to their will.”

“You’re one of them.”

He surged to his feet. “I am the servant of God. He
made me to cleanse the world of that inhuman brood.”

“Witch yourself a mirror. Look at your face; remember
Thea’s. Think of the power she has, and of your own. Different in degree,
maybe, but clearly of the same kind.”

“I am not. I belong to God. He set me among men little
better than beasts; He tried me and He tempered me, strengthening me in the
fire of their hate.
Witch,
they
called me.
Monster. Cat-eyes, warlock,
devil-brat.
They would stone me in the street; they would creep to me in
the dark, begging me to wield my power for them. To heal or to harm; to mend a
broken pot, to foretell a child’s fate, to lay a curse on an enemy. God
moved in me. I did as He commanded and often as they begged. Till the priest,
moved by God’s Adversary, thought to come against me. He was a dour old
man, a drunkard, a begetter of bastards. He brought his bell and his book and
his candle and all his black burden of sin. He had no mercy on a child whose
mother was dead, whose father none had ever known. He would have reft my power
from me. He would have burned me.”

Simon shuddered with the memory, yet his gaze was fixed,
fearless, terrible. “I burned him. He called me witch and devil; God
flamed in me and through me, and I was exalted, and the false priest was
consumed.”

His eyes shifted, blurred. A small sigh escaped him. “I
had not known what I could do. Not all of it. Not this. I think I was mad
before—certainly there had always been two of me, the weak child who
yearned to be human and the self who was all a fire of power. The priest in his
dying made the power master. The child had no hope of victory thereafter.

“The power drove me away from the place where I was
born, the small vile town on a rock in Tuscany. It sent me wandering through
the world, a careless bedlam creature singing the glory of God. I shunned the
Church then, for all I had known of it was that one bad priest. I lived on the
fruits of power, save now and again when charity came unasked for or the fire
in me saw need of earthly strength. I healed a leper in the City of Flowers. I
danced on light above the hills of Lombardy. I grew, and I grew strong, and at
last, when I looked into mortal eyes, I knew amazed that I had grown fair.

“There was a woman. A girl; she was hardly older than
I. She labored in the fields as I walked past. Somewhere I had lost my garment;
I had made one out of sunlight. She saw and she marveled, and I paused, and she
was beautiful, all dark and small and lovely to the lean pallid length of me.
It was a great magic, the meeting of our eyes.

“It was a great sin. We did not know; we were not
spared for that. In the night as we damned ourselves with delight, God struck.
He wielded my power as He wields the lightning; He struck her down with me beside
her. Though I woke in awful agony, she never stirred again.

“I raged. I cried to Heaven and Hell. I flung myself
against the stars; I smote the earth till it shuddered beneath me. And there I
lay while the sun wheeled above me with the moon in its train; the stars stared
their millionfold stare, unmoved by all my fury. A black dream took me.

“I wandered in it. Where I went, how long I traveled,
I never knew. I know it was both long and far. When I woke I was a stranger to
myself, tall, deep-voiced, hard-bodied, with a beard downy-thick on my face.
The place wherein I lay had a flavor of nothing I knew, stone and sweetness and
a music of many voices.

“There God spoke to me. I knew that it was He,
although He spoke with the tongue and the lips of a man. ‘Wake, my son,’
He commanded me. ‘Wake and be strong. I have a task for you.’

“I could not speak. I could only stare.

“God smiled at me through His instrument. ‘Heaven’s
own miracle has set you here among Saint Paul’s disciples, child of power
that you are. Rise up and give thanks; here at last have you found your
destiny. No force of Hell shall prevail against you.’

“Still I was silent. All words had forsaken me. I knew
without comprehension that I had fallen into the arms of the Church; what so
long I had evaded had reached out to embrace me. I was too numb to be afraid.
But I could move, and I rose from my bed and bowed low.