Hounds of God (23 page)

“I don’t think,” said the friar, “that
you need even my poor intercession. But for your sake, if I get so far, I’ll
do as you ask.” He looked down at his hands, at Alf’s cradling them
like marble round clay. “Your touch is peace.”

The pain was terrible. Nails piercing his hands, transfixing
his feet. And his side beneath his heart—like a spear, like a sword. How
could the man walk, talk, smile, even laugh, when every movement crucified his
body?

For this there could be no earthly healing. Alf bowed low
and low. “
Sanctissime.
Most
holy father.”

Fra Giovanni pulled him up, dismayed. “Please don’t.
No one’s supposed to know about it. I can’t have them all bowing
and treating me like a saint. Least of all you, who truly are one.”

Alf’s incredulity struck him mute. There was holiness,
to be so utterly oblivious to itself, even with the great seal it bore. Five
wounds. Five stigmata.

And he had thought that he knew pain. He brought his head up
and mustered all his calmness. “God brought us together here to mend and
to be mended. For what they are worth, I give you my thanks and my blessing.”

“They are worth more than kingdoms.” The
impossibly sweet smile returned, though the dark eyes were sad. “Go with
God, brother. May He shelter all your people and preserve them from harm, and
bring them to Himself at last.”

Anna could move, if she was very careful. She did not know
that she wanted to. Even her eyelids throbbed and burned; she could see only
through a blood-red mist.

Simon’s voice spoke. It seemed to come from everywhere
at once, soft as a whisper yet echoing deep in her brain. “See, woman.
See what your folly has bought you.”

It was like a dream, and it was not. It was too clear, too
distinct, too grimly relentless.

It seemed that she stood under the open sky, immeasurably
vast after the walls that had enclosed her for so long, and the sun was shining
and the gulls were crying. Beneath them like a carpet spread the kingdom of
Rhiyana. Dun and grey and brown, white with snow and green with pine and fir,
hatched with roads that seemed all to run toward the white pearl of Caer Gwent
and the blue glitter of the sea.

That seemed safe, serene, overlaid with a faint golden
shimmer, but the borders seethed and smoldered. The shimmer there was dark and
shot through with flame, and yet something in it put her in mind of Simon’s
eyes.

The land swelled and stretched and grew clear before her.
She could have been a gull or a falcon hovering over the untidy circle of a
town. Ants swarmed in it, men shrunken with distance and height, brandishing
weapons surely too tiny to be deadly. Swords, spears—no. Staves and
cudgels, rakes, scythes, here and there a rusted pike.

Something fled before them, a small ragged scrambling
figure, white hair thin and wild, weak eyes staring out of the tangle,
blood-scarlet and mad with terror. The mob bayed at it. “Witch! Witch!
Demon’s get, sorcerer. God’s curse—”

Anna struggled to cry out. But as in a dream, she was
voiceless, powerless.

The poor pallid creature stumbled and fell. The mob sprang
upon it. A thin shriek mounted to Heaven.

Hoofs thundered. A strong clear voice lashed above the
growls of men turned beasts. A company of knights and sergeants clove through
the mob, and at their head a flame of scarlet.

Anna could have sung for joy. He rode armored, the Prince
Aidan, but for haste or for recklessness he had disdained both helm and
mail-coif. His raven head was bare, his face stark white with wrath; he laid
about him with the flat of his sword.

At the eye of the storm was stillness. The wretched albino
lay twisted impossibly, his colorless hair stained crimson.

The Prince sprang down beside him, knelt, brushed the broken
body with a gentle hand. His steel-grey glance swept the gathered faces. “That,”
he said with deadly softness, “was no more a witch than any of you.”

He rose. Although one or two came near his height, he
towered over them; they flinched and cowered. “Yes,” he purred, “be
afraid. Such return you give your King for all his years of care for you; such
a gift do you give him, this roil of fear and hate.”

Anna felt it. He could not. Not all his pallor was anger; he
was sustaining himself by sheer force of will, and no power. He could not sense
the gathering, the focusing, the sudden bitter loosing.

Stone and hate struck him together. His eyes went wide,
astonished. He reeled.

He did not fall. Blood streamed down his face, blinding him.
He paid it no heed. His hand stretched out. His mind reached, clawing,
slipping, failing. The mob closed in for the kill.

oOo

Anna’s throat was raw with outrage. She flung herself
at Simon; he held her away with contemptuous ease. “Two,” he said, “are
mastered. A third comes to my hand.
So.
”

She struggled; she fought; she willed her eyes to be blind.
No use. Rhiyana unfurled before her, sweeping closer and closer, until Caer
Gwent itself grew about her.

The streets were crowded though it was the fallow time of
Lent, as if lords and commons alike had chosen to take refuge far from the
Crusade. Merchants did a brisk trade in dainties as in necessities. Singers
sang; players plied their trade in front of the cathedral.

But the clamor of the schools was muted, the gate of the
synagogue barricaded shut, the austere houses of the Heresiarch’s flock
empty and silent. Only one man dared preach from the porch of one of the lesser
churches, and he was a friar, a Minorite in tattered grey who proclaimed the
poverty of Christ.

There were white habits and grey cowls everywhere. How had
so many come so deep into Rhiyana in defiance of the ban? How dared they? They
walked like lords, secure in their power. People gave way before them.

Anna plunged past them with stomach-churning speed and swooped
toward the castle. Abruptly she was within it.

Its familiarity tore at her heart. There was the Chancellor’s
Tower where she had lived whenever she was in Caer Gwent. There was the stable
where champed her fiery little gelding, Alf’s gift to her only this past
name-day. And there was the Queen’s garden, so wrought that it seemed far
larger within than without, touched with her magic.

Roses bloomed; small bright birds sang spring songs without
care for the beasts that lazed on the ground below. Some were gifts from far countries,
such of them as chose to sacrifice freedom and homeland for love of the Queen.
Some had come of their own accord: a white hind and her red fawn, a sow and her
piglets, badgers and coneys and sleek red foxes.

And the wolves. Not grey wolves of the wood but white wolves
of the Wood, great as mastiffs, he and she, and their boisterous half-grown
cubs.

The Queen sat on the grass with the she-wolf’s head in
her lap. They were wonderfully alike, the lady in her white gown with her ivory
skin and her ivory hair and her eyes the color of amber, the wolf all white and
golden-eyed.

“Sister,” said the light childlike voice of the
lady, “you are not being wise. The rest of the wildfolk will go back to
their proper places with the next sunrise. You must not linger, not you of them
all, whom humans call my kin and my familiars. They will destroy you as gladly
as they destroy me, and no whit less cruelly.”

Anna heard the response as a voice, husky like a man’s
yet somehow distinctly feminine.
We came
when you came. We go when you go.

“Then your children at least—”

They stay.

Maura’s fingers buried themselves in the thick ruff.
Her eyes had the hard glitter of one who refuses to weep. “Do you
remember,” she murmured, “when Alun was playing just where your
cubs play now? And when we looked, the three young wolves were four and my son
nowhere to be seen, but the largest and most awkward cub looked at us with
startled grey eyes. He had that gift from me, the wolf- shape, yet his talent
was greater. Like Thea’s, limited only by his knowledge.” She shook
her head and mustered a smile. “Such mischief it led him into. When he
walked as a cat and he met a she-cat in heat... his wounds were nothing, but
his shock was all-encompassing. Cats, after all, are creatures of Venus, and
when one takes a shape one takes on its nature as well.”

The wolf’s gaze was wise and strangely compassionate.
He hunted well. We mourn him under the moon.

“I mourn him always. Always. But I must be strong. I
must hold up my head under the crown. It is so heavy, sister. So monstrously
heavy.”

She drooped even in speaking of it, but stiffened with a
visible effort of will, rising to her feet. Her heavy braid uncoiled to her
heels, rich as cream; she took up the somber pelisson she had discarded, the
wimple and veil suited to a matron and a queen.

Slowly she put on the dark overgown with its lining of
marten fur. As she began to fold the wimple, a disturbance brought her about.
The animals were agitated, the more timid already hidden, the hunters alert,
growling softly. Yet even without them she would have known that human feet had
trodden in her garden.

The Pope’s Legate walked among the roses, vivid in the
scarlet of his rank. He moved slowly, breathing deep of the cool clear air, but
under the joyous peace of the garden his face was grim.

As he saw the Queen, both joy and grimness deepened. He
bowed low before her.

She bent her head to him, all queenly. “Eminence,”
she acknowledged him.

“Your Majesty,” he responded. He looked about
him as if he could not help it, his eyes coming to rest where they had begun,
upon her. The grimness filled his face, yet he spoke gently. “Majesty, I
beg you to pardon my intrusion.”

“It is pardoned.” She sounded cool and remote,
unmoved by any trouble.

Silence stretched. The beasts had settled; the wolves sat or
lay in a broad circle about the Cardinal and the Queen, even the cubs still,
watchful.

Benedetto Torrino sighed faintly. “I know how few are
your moments of peace,” he said. “The crown is heavy even for one
well fit to bear it; and what we have brought into this kingdom… Lady, I
regret that we have caused you suffering and must cause you more.”

“
Must
, Lord
Cardinal? Is it the law of God that the Church must hound us to death and our
realm to ruin?”

“It is the law of the world that a will to good must
often turn all to evil. His Holiness wishes only that the world be cleansed of
stain and brought back to its God. His servants labor to work his will, and His
will, as best they may.”

She laughed, cold and clear. “You believe that? Then
you are an innocent. We suffer and die so that one small circle of venal men
may hold more power in the Curia than any of their rivals.”

“Not entirely, Lady. Not entirely.”

“Enough.” The wimple was crushed in her hand;
she let it fall. “I am weary, Lord Cardinal, and it seems I am to have no
rest even here where none but my dearest kin may come. Why have you braved the
wards and the ban?”

“I had no choice.” From his sleeve Torrino took
a folded parchment. “This has come to me. I think you should know of it.”

She held it, looking at it. Her fingers tightened. She
opened the missive, read slowly.

Nothing changed in her face or her bearing, yet the air
darkened and stilled as before thunder. She looked up. Her eyes were the color
of sulfur. “Your embassy is ended forthwith. You are to return to Rome. A
man of firmer will and greater devotion to God and to Mother Church will fill
your place. He will, of course, be a monk of Saint Paul.”

“That is not the... precise... wording of the letter.”

“That is its import.” She turned it in her
hands. “Pope Honorius never saw this.”

“He signed it. There is the seal.”

“And its secret mark, the exact number of points in
Saint Peter’s beard.” She shook her head slightly, almost amused. “My
lord, there is an old, old trick. A heap of documents, a high lord in haste,
the crucial and betraying writ so concealed that only its margin is visible,
ready to be signed. Men have been done to death in that fashion, as we may well
be. For I have little doubt that with this His Holiness signed another
addressed to the new Legate, granting God’s Hounds full power and full discretion
in the harrowing of Rhiyana.”

“I cannot believe—” Torrino broke off.
More slowly, more softly, he said, “I can. God help me; God help us all.”

“You move too slowly to sate the bloodthirst of a
Hound. You have not even lowered the Interdict; not by your command have
innocent folk been burned in the markets and before the churches. The Hounds
and the Crusade have advanced without you.”

“I have made no effort to stop them.” Torrino’s
voice was harsh.

“You have been powerless. So too have I. Did I enforce
the ban when the grey cowls appeared all at once and with brazen boldness in
every hamlet, even in my own city?”

“But not in your hall or before your court.”

“They will not defile their sanctity with my presence.
Not until they come triumphant to demand my life.”

“Lady,” he said. “Lady, believe. I came
armed with righteousness to search out a tribe of devils. I found order and
peace, a just king, a people no more evil than any other in this world. I do
not believe that you have deceived me, or that I have deceived myself. Your
sorceries, the infidels among you…they have not earned death or even
Interdict, least of all without proper trial. I would have your people tried,
given time to speak in their own defense, dealt with thereafter singly and with
justice, without peril to your kingdom.”

“What one would have and what one will have do not
often meet. Will you obey your false orders, my lord?”

He took them from her hand. With a sudden fierce movement he
tore the sheet asunder.